Transcript
Professor Jeff Dudis (0:00)
Coca Cola for the big, for the small, the short and the tall. Peacemakers risk takers for the optimists, pessimists for long distance love for introverts and extroverts, the thinkers and the doers for old friends and new Coca Cola for everyone. Pick up some Coca Cola at a store near you. My name is Percy Jackson. Getting in trouble is like breathing for me. The hit series returns to Disney and Hulu. The danger the camp is under is.
Professor Stephen Dyson (0:39)
Greater than you can possibly imagine.
Professor Jeff Dudis (0:41)
For the key to our survival, three.
Professor Stephen Dyson (0:43)
Of you must quest to the Sea of Monsters.
Professor Jeff Dudis (0:47)
Let's go do the impossible.
Professor Stephen Dyson (0:50)
Percy Percy Jackson and the olympians New Season 2 episode premiere December 10th on Disney and Hulu. Learn more at disneyplus.com whatson this episode is brought to you by ebay. Before all the algorithm fed blah and the endless sea of dupes, shopping used to feel more fun. Find that feeling again on ebay. It's not mindless scrolling, it's a fashion pursuit. And when you score that rare Adidas collab or the Dior saddlebag you've been manifesting, it's a rush. Ebay has millions of pre loved finds from hundreds of brands backed by authenticity guarantee. Ebay Things people love.
Podcast Host (1:31)
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Professor Stephen Dyson (1:35)
It's the Pop Culture Professors and we continue our analysis of the Apple TV series Pluribus. First we have my analysis of episode four, and then we have analysis by myself and Professor Dudas of episode five. I'm Professor Stephen Dyson and I'm a political science professor who has just watched episode four of Pluribus. And I'm going to give you my sort of immediate reactions and breakdown of what I see as some of the main themes and ideas that were in this episode. I think in this episode, which I really enjoyed and think is important in the evolution of this first season, we're seeing Pluribus continue to function as kind of a mirror or a crucible, asking us to consider some key questions, what we value and why. And that's in the area both of what we value in relationships and in others and what we value in kind of cultural products such as art. I think another key question this episode asked us is how do we know a person? And even how do we know ourselves? And even can we know a person? Can we know ourselves? And then I think another key question that was in this episode and maybe actually is the dominant thematic of the show as a whole, is what are our obligations to collectivities and to individuals? And what's the sort of proper balance or the way to navigate what. What are essentially a set of irresolvable dilemmas where sometimes the kind of enactment of individuality is sort of harmful to a collectivity or harmful to someone else. And of course, vice versa. So this episode begins in Paraguay, and we know from the last episode that the chap who we meet in the first sort of 15 minutes of the episode is. Is Manousis Oviedo, another one of the immune. Someone who, like Carol, is not connected by the Pluribus, and someone who also, like Carol, proudly holds themselves apart from and aside from the collectivity. And that had been true even before the virus had arrived. I'd commented on last week's episode that I thought there was something sort of deliciously symbolic about Manusis Oviedo, the immune person, an immune person from the Pluribus, being the sort of owner or the manager of a self storage unit. And, you know, what are people other than sort of literal self storage units? So there's something delicious in that. And we see how Manusa Sovieto is experiencing the kind of Pluribus crisis, and he has holed himself up within the kind of office of the self storage unit complex, and he's kind of squirreled himself away. He's communicating with the outside world or sort of searching the outside world for other people who are immune by kind of systematically searching through radio frequencies and listening out for anyone who might be broadcasting. Classic trope of these kind of post apocalyptic films, listening out for the other survivors. And then sort of, ironically enough, the telephone goes and he is contacted directly by Carol. We know from previous episodes how that conversation went. They sort of mutually swore at each other. And we see, as had been speculated by someone in the comments section for last week's video video, that Carol had really got his attention by swearing back at him that it was really a smart idea to do that and that the two are likely to be connected sometime in the future. Like Carol Manouses Oviedo is someone who is engaging in the digital world through essentially analog means. You know, he has this radio transmitter. He doesn't seem to be on the Internet. He doesn't seem to have a smartphone. You know, Carol's able to reach him on a landline. So that's another one of these similarities between Carol and Manousis. And it does sort of reinforce one of the metaphors of the show, which is the Pluribus in some sense are representing the. The connectivity or maybe even the simulation of connectivity, the false connectivity that is brought about in Our digital age. And then the other thing that goes on in this sequence at the start of this episode is we see that Manousis is kind of incompletely disconnected from the Pluribus, or he's trying very hard to maintain his disconnection from the Pluribus, but he does have sort of biological needs. And so the Plurib keeps sending sort of an emissary with deliveries of food, which he's sort of tempted to take, you know, showing that you can't completely disconnect, but he doesn't take those deliveries of food, but to feed himself. In the end, Manusa Saviedo opens up his clients self storage units and he writes them sort of a letter of apology for the intrusion. But I did think that was another clever way to use that, the symbolism of the, quote, self storage unit that Manassis, in the end, who is a person who sort of radically respects individuality or his own privacy, is sort of forced to open up other people's privacy to pry open the kind of barriers to other selves. And he does so apologetically and he does so because of desperate need. But it's perhaps demonstrating this, this point that it is impossible, however radically individualistic you are, to exist entirely separate from some sort of wider community. Last point I'll make in this section is that once again, Pluribus has done something sort of formally interesting as a TV show with this opening section set with Manusa Saviedo, in that he doesn't really speak. He only says a couple of words to Carol right at the end of the segment. Doesn't really speak for, you know, I think it was 12, 10 or 12 minutes of the show, which is the second time the show has had almost 15 minutes, you know, maybe a quarter of its or a third even of its of the episode's runtime kind of conducted in total silence, which is sort of a daring thing to do formally, I think. When Zoza got on the plane to go and see Carol a couple of episodes back, there was also no dialogue in the. In the early part of that episode. And then we move to catching up with Carol. And the Carol we see in this week's episode is a person who is much more active, who is asking far more questions, and he's really sort of taking control of the situation a little bit more. And I don't know if that's kind of a stages of grief thing. She's just sort of emerging from the shock of her situation, but she kind of traps the Pluribus in conversation into revealing things that the collectivity doesn't want to reveal. She devises a plan to use truth serum and we'll say more about this to get answers that she wants from the Pluribus. We see her as having collected or making a set of notes on how the virus operates, how the collectivity works. And she's really sort of taking action now in trying to undo what's been done. At one point at the end of the episode, she cries, I have agency. And that could really be the sort of tagline for this episode. We see Carol now taking much more control of her situation. There's another of the show's signature themes about what we value and why that happens. Sort of midway through the episode here in that Carol engages the Pluribus in a conversation about art. And they sort of have a rudimentary class in art appreciation, if you like. And Carol is using her own art, her books, her fantasy historical books as an example, and she's asking the Pluribus, you know, do you like my books? And of course they're very sort of solicitous of her and her feelings and they say, yeah, we love your books, we think they're wonderful. But she very quickly discovers that they have no real in depth critical appreciation of her art or really any sort of cultural product. They have no critical vocabulary. They just keep trotting out the same, you know, it's wonderful, it's wonderful trotting out the same words. And Carol says, stop saying the same thing. And I think this is the. Another one of the show's kind of central metaphors coming to the fore here, which is the. The show does seem to be kind of skewering lowest common denominator appreciations of the good things or the higher things of human culture, and suggesting that maybe entities like ChatGPT, which just sort of agglomerate sort of huge corpses of human text, then spit out not particularly insightful opinions, but sort of mid or lowest common denominator opinions. But the show is very clever here. It's not a, a one dimensional in diamond of something like Chat GPT because of course, remember before the virus arrived, Carol was equally disdainful of the mass of genuine human opinion, not artificial intelligence opinion, in that she didn't respect her own fans. She thought they were essentially idiots and she thought that they too had no critical appreciation. And so Carol has a fairly explicitly elitist perspective on the general public's ability to understand kind of higher art forms that is being sort of exacerbated by the Pluribus virus. I Mean, she, she encourages the Pluribus to compare her books with Shakespeare and finds out that they actually have, you know, just a unidimensional opinion on both. You know, both are great, both are wonderful, but no real ability to distinguish between the merit of the two things. No real ability to understand that Shakespeare was operating on a higher literary or cultural level than Carol herself was. And in this, of course, Carol is a giant snob, you know, and a huge elitist. And I think Pluribus is both showing the dangers or I guess the terror of like lowest common denominator opinion and how you do need people of higher critical faculties in order to understand the better things in, in human life. But at the same time, she's sort of a hypocrite, if that's not too strong a word, because she's putting out what she knows is kind of middlebrow cultural products. And she's not even doing that, you know, thoroughly, sincerely. She's not. She's not disavowing these middlebrow cultural products and saying, well, I just make money off them. I don't care what the reception was. She also wants them to be popular, she wants them to be liked. So she's simultaneously sort of rejecting mass opinion and also kind of relying on it for her own sort of self worth and self esteem. And I think this is, again, for me, one of the great sort of virtues of this show is it's not a sort of one dimensional critique. It sort of offers a critique and then it turns the critique back on itself. And it shows really what, you know, how complex humans are in all facets of their relations with each other and with the world. And I do really appreciate that kind of multidimensional critical nature that the show has. And that's exemplified really by the revelations that Carol is able to get from the Pluribus about her late wife Helen. Helen, whose judgment and sort of approval, of course Carol would, would want and crave and desire and need more than anyone else. She discovers from the Pluribus that Helen not only maybe held her own public books in higher regard than Carol herself does. Helen, of course, had explained to Carol that your books make people happy, and if that's not art, it's at least something. And Carol was maybe a touch more skeptical about them than Helen was, but also, and this is kind of a dagger to Carol, she discovers that Helen was not really impressed by Carol's serious book. You know, we'd learned in earlier episodes that Carol had come up with a serious book. We find out in this episode. It's a novel that she thought was radically different than the fare that she had been putting out. And she was just kind of too timid to put it out into the world. But Helen had read it, Helen had knew of it, Helen had said, you know, she thinks it'll be popular, it'll be well received. But the Pluribus, who of course know Helen's innermost thoughts, reveal to Carol that Helen thought it was middling. It was, meh. It wasn't that good. But this is really an example of the show telling us what human relationships are about. That Carol would not stop loving Helen or even be particularly annoyed maybe with Helen for holding that opinion. That's, you know, a hurtful opinion Helen would hold. But the truth is that the people we love, real human beings, do hold hurtful opinions, you know, and do differ from us, and they don't just give us constant approval. And the very horror of the Pluribus, to Carol, and maybe to us, is that it does just give this kind of unconditional approval. And that's maybe what we think we want, but it's not what we actually need from a fully sustaining, fully realized human relationship. And Carol trusts and admires, and I'm sure it's one of the things that she loved about Helen, that Helen has an independent critical judgment, even when that independent critical judgment is turned on Carol in ways that she might not instantly sort of appreciate. And this goes to what I'd flagged as another of the great sort of themes of this episode, how to know a person or yourself, you know, do we ever really know a person? Carol didn't really know that about Helen. And Helen's probably the person she knows best in the world. And that's revealed to. To Carol sort of post mortem by the Pluribus. She maybe didn't fully know some pretty crucial things about her lover. And ultimately this kind of unknowability of other human beings is one of the things that keeps us fascinated and that. That keeps relationships viable. And if you do know everything about others, then they become trivial or maybe less fascinating and less exciting and less viable objects of our desire and of our love. And this is a theme that's also illustrated in this part of the episode by Carol's truth serum plan. And she goes to a hospital and she procures this truth serum and she tests the thing on herself and then sort of video records the reactions and what she does while under the influence of the truth serum. And, you know, eventually she falls asleep and Then we see one, what she actually did. And what she did was a set of surprising things. She kind of stalked around the apartment in ways that she didn't recognize or didn't remember. She said things that were, were shocking even to herself. Carol doesn't even know herself and none of us really do. And that's one of the things the show is saying. Carol shocks herself by revealing what I think sharp eyed viewers of the show had noticed and someone had said again in comments on an earlier one of these, these video reactions that Carol obviously has a sort of erotic fantasy or an erotic charge towards Zoja. And we know that Zorja is the physical manifestation, albeit with a, with a different gender physical manifestation of Raban, Carol's romantic hero from her books. And she'd put her erotic fantasy, I guess, into these books and tried to disguise it. And maybe the outer public couldn't know who Rabban really was in Carol's subconscious and maybe Carol herself also didn't know. But it's, but it's revealed to us and maybe even to her by this truth serum. And she's, she's shocked by the fact that she's physically attracted to Zoja or maybe she's just shocked by the fact that she says it out loud and it's a kind of internal, personal thing. But I do think it goes to this broader theme of how do we know other people and how do we know ourselves? And then I think we come to the final section of the episode which I think thematically was re engaging one of the constant questions in the show, which is what are our obligations to communities or to collectivities versus our obligations to individuals? Whether those individuals are other individuals that we interact with or are our obligations to ourself as an individual and how do we negotiate the balance between the two? And I think what the show is telling us is that it's a, a balance that's in sort of constant negotiation. Whether that's a negotiation that's personal and interpersonal, whether it's a negotiation that's cultural or whether it's a negotiation that's political. These are never the settled questions and they're never questions on which you can just find the truthful, you know, the one true perspective. It's why I do think this show is subject to so many readings and can be sort of gotten at from so many different perspectives and every shard of its kind of critical thrust is sort of multivalent and you can get at it from different, different angles. Whether they're political IDEOLOGIES or just sort of interpersonal ideologies. Carol reveals the story of Camp Freedom Falls, which was a conversion therapy camp that her mother had sent her to. And this is one of the reasons why she finds the pluribus, in their manifestation, so sort of horrifying, because they are a smiling collectivity that is claiming to have Carol's best interests at heart, but fundamentally wants to change her and wants to change her in ways that are absolutely core to Carol's individuality, and she doesn't want to be changed. And it's sort of horrifying in the Camp Freedom Falls example, because these were also people, Carol tells us, who just had these benign smiles on her face and said they were trying to do something to help her, shouldn't want to be helped in that way. And even more horrifying, her mother, who you presume was the person she trusted most in the world at that stage of her life, was the person who had put her in that situation. And maybe her mother thought it's in her best interest. But of course, it's a radical, even violent intrusion on Carol's individuality to try and sort of compel her to be different in a way that's absolutely core to her central identity. And so at that point, you know, you're absolutely on the side of the. The individual. And, you know, this seems like a pretty monovalent point that the. The show is making at this stage, but then it sort of turns a little bit in that Carol, who has devised this plan to try to figure out how to reverse what she calls the joining, how to. How to reverse the pluribus, and she's going to give truth serum, and she does, to Zoja and try and get answers from the physical body of Zorja, maybe the remnants of what exists of Zoja's individuality. Does the truth serum kind of work collectively on the pluribus, or is the. Is the point of the truth serum that it sort of isolates Zojja from the. From the pluribus? Maybe she would retain knowledge from the pluribus, would, but would be able to operate as an individual. I wasn't quite clear on. On that, but she. She starts this line of inquiry with Zojjah aimed at getting answers on how to reverse what's going on. And Zojja, of course, also doesn't want to be changed, or the pluribus in the form of Zojja, doesn't want to be changed. They don't want to be restored to the individuality that Carol, you know, clearly sees as the only viable or dignified human form. And at one point, the pluribus, or Zorsa, speaking for the Pluribus, says to Carol, you know, we've been you, but you've never been us. We've been individuals. We've been separate from one another. We found others unknowable and maybe hostile and maybe difficult to navigate and get along with. And we know what that's like. But you, Carol, have never experienced the kind of radical collectivity that we have. And we're telling you it's good. We're telling you we don't want to turn back. But this, of course, exposes a complete paradox. You know, Carol can assert she has agency, but can the pluribus collectively assert that they have agency? And when they're saying, we don't want to go back, we've been you, you've never been us, are they speaking for the collective will of all these individuals, or are they speaking to just for some generalized collectivity, the pluribus writ large, that can't be reduced to any of these individuals? Are they just an agglomeration of public opinion? Is it, you know, 70% of the. Of the individuals in the pluribus really want to stay in the Pluribus. And. And so, you know, it's almost like a majority vote thing. Obviously not literally, but I'm trying to metaphorically make the point that I think this is the show again, trying to shine a light on act as a mirror for. Act as a crucible for asking these questions about individuality versus collectivity. Carol, of course, whenever she asserts her individuality, she's not just acting on herself or her actions are not just having implications for herself. And this is another thing the sho is doing very well is that it is not allowing us the easy answer of like you do you or the individual is the most important thing, which has perhaps been the default position in contemporary Western philosophy and the contemporary United States for. For a long period of time now, that all that matters is the individual. Because whenever Carol asserts her individuality, I don't know too stringently, too strongly she's causing physical harm to the collectivity. We saw in earlier episodes that whenever Carol got kind of really angry or really frustrated, lots of people would die in the collective in the Pluribus. And in this episode, we see that Carol's truth serum plan has had potentially fatal, probably not, but in the episode is presented as potentially fatal impact and effects on Zoja, who has a cardiac arrest arrest as the episode ends. And so another, I think really rich episode this week. A really sort of enjoyable, thematically rich and fulfilling and I don't know, nutritious episode this week. Look, I've been on my own this week. Professor Dudas is away for one week only. He'll be rejoining us next week. But because I've been on my own, it does mean that I really would value commentary. And you know, in the, in the comments section, I'd love for you to pick apart some of the ideas that I've, I've put on the table here. As always, these are one person's. Well, usually it's two people, but for this week, one person's interpretations. The show is, you know, to use a ten dollar set of words, a floating signifier. It's, it's capable of being read in many different ways. I really would love to be challenged. I'll love to hear additional thoughts or what you think were going on in the episode. And that would be especially valuable to me this week because I've just been kind of talking into a camera on my own for a period of time here and I could be just completely wrong in everything I've said. So please do leave a comment. We always value them and we try to interact as much as we can and kind of bring them into subsequent episodes as well. Please also. And I always feel a little awkward kind of asking for this, but it does really help the channel. If you can subscribe, if you can like, if you can share the videos that would, that would really be terrific. Next week, Professor Dudas will be back. We'll be back to the two hander format. But on that bombshell, the holidays have.