I want you on this right away. What's the claim? Sutter Cain is missing. Who? Sutter Cain. Do you read Suttercane? Welcome to Personal Canon, I'm Maggie Siebert. Each week I'll interview someone about one of their favorite works of art across all mediums. This week I spoke with none other than Nick Land.
Land's work spans decades. In the late 80s into the 90s, he collaborated with theorists and writers like Mark Fisher, Kodwo Eschen, Hyperdub Records founder Code9, and Sadie Plant as part of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. The CCRU's work is still influential today, with electronic music artist 1otrix Pointnever recently claiming inspiration from the group. Land's philosophical project deals with themes of exit, alterity, and what he calls abstract horror. These ideas are a veritable minefield, existing far outside the realm of traditional academia, particularly given Land's association with the anti-democratic school of thought known as the Dark Enlightenment. There is ongoing debate about the exact nature of the relationship between Land's earlier work, which some would argue skews much further left, and his more recent anti-egalitarian
thought. While Land and I are decidedly operating on completely different ends of the political and philosophical spectrum, he nevertheless remains one of the most discussed philosophers of our time. In this episode, we will discuss John Carpenter's 1994 cult classic, In the Mouth of Madness. The film, considered by many to be one of the only successful depictions of Lovecraftian horror in cinema, follows insurance investigator John Trent as he searches for the elusive horror novelist Sutter Cain. Reality begins to unfurl as Trent gets closer to Cain before things get aggressively apocalyptic. In the Mouth of Madness is a film rife with Landian symbolism, so it's no wonder it's a favorite of his. Stay with us. All right, so this is kind of the, I'm going to throw you a softball here.
Would you mind kind of explaining in layman's terms the focus of your work, particularly within the last decade? Just a basic kind of summation of who you are. Okay, well, yeah, I mean, that's not necessarily that easy. It's quite divergent. I mean, I think for today, I should probably put my abstract horror hat on because that's like, that's the lineage that I think is most relevant to carpenters in the mouth of madness, which I think we're going to be talking about today.
Yeah, absolutely. So if you wouldn't mind touching specifically on abstract horror and sort of the couple of published works that you have that pertain to that. being asked to do this has actually sort of really reminded me about how how important this movie has been to me um you know i i hope that will come that will come out in our discussion it's sort of in a way i've become so much just part of the structural background of a lot of the things I think about that it would become almost invisible, you know, and it was really actually, I mean, I'm quite grateful to you for sort of prodding
me in this direction and getting me to sort of explicitly revisit it. so I think there are some there are some questions in what I would call abstract horror that are really going to be at the centre of this discussion or really important to it if I'm just going to give an extremely sort of cursory intro and will raise one of the issues among a bundle that I think are going to come up. The abstract in abstract horror is meant to be something intrinsic.
When you ask, well, really, what is horror fiction about, whether literary or cinematic, it seems to me that it's really essential to it that it touches upon the outside in a sense that's strongly philosophical. And by strongly philosophical, I mean it's outside of anything that could possibly be a phenomenon. It's, you know, so it's, we're in the sort of history of transcendental philosophy in raising it this way in the notion, you know, where Kant asks people in positing this, let's say, lots of,
from the word, in commas, entity, the thing in itself, that this is something that's not in space or time, it's not causally structured. None of the sort of categories or forms of intuition that we have available to us can apprehend it. And it's only, there's therefore this negative philosophical task of trying to strip away those irrelevant but inevitable structures of apprehension. It's only in refusing to think of it in certain intuitable forms that one gets a kind of suggestion of the sort of thing one is actually tackling.
you know this is what the word reality within both the philosophical and the horror genre has that suggestion to it that reality is something that we're always misconceiving and replace substituting with certain kind of comfortable illusions and so to put it in more pulpy terms there's a kind of a genre criticism that goes along with that which is I think one of the questions inevitably we have to ask about this movie is
does it whatever it is if it purports to be a work of horror fiction does it show too much monster you know to me this is the grave the grave failure mode that is inherent in the genre, that it ruins itself, it subverts its true vocational ambition if it shows too much monster, if it kind of produces some phenomenal substitute for the thing that is really the kind of object of its concern. So maybe that's enough rambling, you know, preparatory rambling.
But I hope the relevance to Carpenter's work is clear from that. I think given the complexity of some of the ideas that we're working with here, that's about as straightforward of an overview as we could hope for. So I think that's a really excellent way to seg into some more. I just want to give the audience a bit more of a baseline about you before we continue. And so I think that's a great place to seg into talking a little bit about Lovecraft's influence on your work, as well as the broader Cthulhu mythos, especially given the nature of this particular film. I'm curious, not only if you could explain how Lovecraft has influenced your body of work from,
you know, I suppose since the CCRU till now. But also, I'm curious about your first encounter with Lovecraft, if you recall the first time that you read a short story or anything of that nature. I think I actually came to Lovecraft quite late, which is to say that, you know, I already had a considerable amount of baggage in relation to Lovecraft, like especially the very interesting comments about him that you find in Deleuze and Guattari's work before actually coming across his story. So I sort of missed out on a naive, innocent encounter with Lovecraft.
I mean, in terms of what, you know, his importance, I mean I think yes it's interesting you know what people when they sort of try and encapsulate what Lovecraft is about they often use this term cosmic horror and when that's understood in the terms you know it's being it's being used for like it's when it's understood as just a designator for for for um love cross work i think it's it's not at all bad um and it is a sort of it's actually on a kind of plane
that it's competitive with basic religious frames i think i mean i think that you know to be a Lovecraftian is in a sense a kind of a religious stance. And the ultimate basis of that stance is that the reality of the cosmos is utterly indifferent to human concerns. I mean in an absolute nutshell so I mean if you're looking at that epistemologically you're obviously in the zone we started off with you know all these
Kantian type questions about transcendental philosophy about the nature of reality being radically different to the arm modes of apprehension but I think that the more popular acceptation of it is maybe more on the moral plane which is just to say that what in Apocalypse Now, which is a movie that I think actually could come up in this discussion as being relevant, is called moral terror. Moral terror of the fact that one's basic structure of moral intuition has no anchor in the final fabric of reality.
And so when reality seeps through the walls, as it does in the mouth of madness, you know, what comes with that is this fact that this outsideness is utterly alien to our own sense of cosmic rightness, you know, whatever religious tradition we've inherited that from. And that's what gives it its horrific inclination. It's not that it's, I think, the important point here is it's not that it's kind of satanic or it's not that it's in the role of the negative within any particular religious framework.
It's negativity, at least, is one of utter indifference. You know, it's not, it's Lovecraft's monstrosities and structures of cosmic aberrance are not evil. You know, to call them evil is to domesticate them. They're just absolutely alien. And it's this encounter with the absolutely alien that he sees as, you know, the motor of horror. And obviously, concretely, it's the thing that drives his heroes so consistently insane. They're encountering something worse than an opposition to their frames of moral rightness.
They're dealing with something that is absolutely indifferent to them. So I think that gives us a really excellent baseline to kind of finally dive into the film. For viewers who haven't seen it, or listeners rather, the John Carpenter film was released in the States in 1995, first in Italy in 1994. And it tells the story of an insurance investigator named John Trent, played by the great Sam Neill, and his search for the elusive horror novelist Sutter Cain. It was released to, I guess, comparatively little fanfare, though it has since become known as one of the few films that was able to successfully capture a Lovecraftian tone or at least gesture towards it.
um yeah so before we get into your thoughts on on on the film proper i wanted to kind of uh get a get an understanding of what you were doing around the time of the film's release in 94 95 uh just to kind of get a sense of where your head was at roughly when you would have been encountering this film uh well the person who introduced me to this movie was mark fisher really um who had seen it just a little bit before and thought it was amazing and of course the ccru as a whole would find it amazing and so we all watched it at his apartment and we're all completely enthralled by it um so uh you know in terms of what else was going i mean it's hard to
a whole bunch of other things were going on at that time. But, yeah. And I'm not sure what the date. I would think that would be not so long after it came out, frankly. You know, maybe really soon after it came out. So you would have watched it on home video on VHS, I would have assumed. Yeah, I might not actually be able to remember, but I suspect so, yeah. so so at the time were you were you familiar with or or would you consider yourself a fan of carpenter's other work uh because i mean though plot wise a lot of it is is you know obviously a pretty far cry from this um he tends to deal with these kinds of themes of alterity and the outside
and all of those things uh pretty heavily so uh did you have a relationship with any of his other films yeah to a degree i mean obviously i knew the thing and and again it's just that would make it equally suitable topic for a conversation i mean it's spectacularly fascinating movie and in many of the same terms that we're going to be discussing this one but there were a lot of his movies i hadn't seen at that point so it wasn't uh it wasn't that i i was a a kind of a serious carpenter aficionado but he was definitely on on the radar for sure so i think uh one of my my one of my
favorite elements of of this film is uh sam neill's performance as john trent i think he yes perfectly kind of encapsulates not only your sort of wide-eyed Lovecraftian protagonist very well, but he brings this kind of pulpy kind of smarm and sleaze to the role a little bit. I'm curious, first of all, you know, how much, I guess just what other elements of the film that you really feel are more successful than other films that purport to be Lovecraftian. Yes. Well, yeah, I think that's the sort of question
that maybe opens up in a lot of ways. I mean, my starting point for that would be, again, getting back to the showing more does it show too much monster issue which I think you know this in the mouth of madness is like I think to a lot of the early responses to a fault extremely metaphysically involved movie I mean it's like it's hugely self referential you know it's It absolutely loves these paradox loops of all kinds, lots of strange time structures in it,
this incessant question all the way through about the nature of reality. And so the horror really has this kind of philosophical cosmic frame to it that I think most of the Lovecraft movies I've seen signally lack. you know and i think obviously no one you'd have to be crazy to to be sort of reading lovecraft because you want um you want crazy monsters i mean it's like he does have great monsters and there'll be
need perhaps to talk about some of them. And in fact, probably better monsters than the actual monsters that we're going to come across in this movie. But the monsters aren't the point, you know. And I think what the Mouth of Madness does so well is it just, it makes all the monstrosity indicative and suggestive. It's not when you see something horrible, it's not that you're seeing what the horror of the movie is about. Instead, you're seeing something that is just producing a crack and cracking things through which one captures a shadowy glimpse of something behind the monster that is the real object of the movie. What I find
so successful about much of the actual horrific moments in the film is that we don't actually even see what you might call a monster until much toward the end of the film, after John Trent has already encountered Sutter Cain. And even then, they're largely, as you said, shrouded in shadows. The focus is very much on Trent attempting to escape the monsters. And so prior to that, what we're seeing is the horror of encountering the outside and the kind of metaphysical effects that it has on the people surrounding Trent. I'm thinking in particular that wonderful scene toward the beginning of the movie
where Cain's agent bursts through the window of a diner with an axe and asks Trent, do you read Sutter Cain? And so I almost sort of want to, and I'm going to butcher the pronunciation of this because I've never actually talked to anybody about it verbally, but I can't help but find some comparisons between this and some of the ideas that you're touching on in Phil Undu. Is that how you pronounce that? Yeah, sure. It's a textual thing, so the pronunciation is very much a matter of private volition, I think. Okay, sure.
But so obviously, you know, to touch on the on the on the plot of that is maybe a bit of a moot point. But yeah, in the in the work, you know, the character Susie disturbs kind of her fellow students by describing the visuals of this ultra immersive video game that she's playing to the point that a fellow student attempts suicide. so I'm curious um this all strikes me as a very sort of uh you know uh carpenter-esque idea about malignant art and media and I guess I'm curious what appeals to you so much about that idea yes okay I mean this I think is one of the great lines of discussion in this I know the second part
of your question, honestly, is the most difficult thing. And I'm not sure, I don't really trust myself to have insight about it, except to say that I do find that idea extremely fascinating. It's like, I mean, for people, I don't know, I'm going to assume people have seen In the Mouth of Madness. you know what one of the things about it is it's it's extremely dense like you something fantastic is happening all the time and this starts right at the start in the in the opening credits where what you're seeing there's this just there's this just process of machinery and i think john
Carpet actually wrote sort of a kind of electric soundtrack, a kind of very driving electric soundtrack. And what you're seeing, you gradually understand, it's this whirring, purring machinery, is this media mass production process. I think what is being produced, initially I thought it was the book. We'll have to get to that in a second. But actually, what is being produced, what's being printed is the poster, the promotional poster for the book.
on the posters it just says you know it says a bunch of things but the main thing is coming soon and then you know in the mouth of madness by Sutter Cain so the name of the movie is the name of a book in the movie the whole thing is incredibly tangled and self referential and the horror is opened by this industrial media event so it's not just it's not just that In the Mouth of Meters is a pulp masterpiece or anything it absolutely is
but it's also completely about pulp the whole thing is this tight burning cybernetic loop of constantly sort of folding back into itself and so before you see you know anything else any any kind of typical uh horror scenes of any kind all you're seeing is this is this process of industrial media mass mass production um which I think anchors it to what you're just talking about. The malignancy, the topic, the horror topic,
is this cultural, industrial, capitalist media process. That's what is actually driving it. And the coming soon, you know, is obviously in context, this apocalyptic declaration is a revelation coming soon. The apocalypse and the apocalypse is, although we don't yet see it, this mass production of promotion posters for this book. yeah sorry just there was just one oh yeah i just wanted to say uh on this that all the way through
the movie it there's this one of the things it does all the time is it's concerned about how things look from the other side a whole bunch of moments that you get in the course of the movie you know often close together or maybe far apart you see the same thing and then you see it from the other side and the other side is the is the is the horror vision you know so you see something that is potentially inane or you know harmless almost to a parodic extent and then seen from another angle you see you see its horrific reality and and the opening credits are already doing that you know like what's what's so horrible about a printing press um it makes no sense at
first you know but the promise is already there right from the start that by the time you've seen this movie you will understand why you're seeing something horrific and and if i can just let's say one more thing on this because i just think it's the most amazing moment is when trent is you first see him being dragged into this Ludwig asylum everything's going crazy as he says later everything's going to shit out there isn't it so all these violent psychotics are being sort of dragged into the asylum and John Trent is he's being extremely
violent and manic he's dragged and thrown into a cell. The guy running the asylum, who also, I think, I mean, there's lots of, I think, just really superb pulp acting in this. This guy's also fantastic, who plays this guy, Saperstein. And so he's obviously having a really bad day. There's people shouting everywhere because the very first words that Trent says in the movie is, I'm not insane. This is already a really interesting one of these, we're going to see this from the other side, little moments. I'm not insane. It's sort of the opening framing.
And all the other inmates all sort of join in this chorus of variations of all those, from every cell, this shrieking maniac saying, I'm not insane, I'm not insane. You know, so Seberstein's having a really bad day. And in order to calm everyone down, he uses the asylum PA system to play We've Only Just Begun by the Carpenters. So there's a little Carpenters joke. There's this absolutely saccharine song being played, you know, and you just obviously can see the hope he's got that it's going to calm all these people down. And, you know, just like this coming soon, we've only just begun is one of these little sentences
that actually when you see it from the other side, which Trent already does, is absolutely horrific. You know, it's like you can see that Trent already is hearing those words from the side in which far from being some kind of, you know, anesthetizing soft message. It's an absolutely, he's just been prodded even further into a state of kind of extreme psychotic paranoia by it. So it's just an amazing scene, I think, and really captures a lot of what is great about the movie. so uh what an excellent uh segue into uh my next question which uh i wanted to chat a little bit
about one of my personal favorite scenes and how it relates to uh your idea of exit um so for uh for viewers or listeners who have not seen the film uh as it progresses uh trent and his uh and Kane's editor, Linda Stiles is her name. They travel in search of the town, the fictional town, Hobbs End, that is the setting of all of Kane's novels. It's in New Hampshire. I must say this movie lands a little bit different for me ever since I moved to Providence, Rhode Island. Right. So, in search of Hobbs End, Trent believes this whole thing to be a publicity stunt. but through the drive they kind of have this moment
where they sort of phase between their reality and into Kane's and discover that not only is Hobbs End real but that Kane is there and is exerting tremendous power over the town and all of its residents and at this point in the film the visuals take a much more surreal kind of turn And my personal favorite moment in the film, and the one that never fails to frighten me, is when they're driving down the highway at night, and there's a boy riding a bicycle with two playing cards attached to the spokes. And he keeps phasing through the shot and returning, and then eventually returns extremely aged and deformed, but repeats this phrase in a child's voice, he won't let me leave.
Right, yeah, yeah. And I'm interested in talking a little bit about your idea of exit and the idea of this malignant force ensnaring and trapping characters in this kind of unreality. Yeah. No, it's a really good question and is really the heart of the movie. and you know sort of at the risk of obviously just constantly invoking this particular sort of philosophical setting but I find it sort of helpful in this respect
of you know in the thought of the thing in itself in the thought of this thing that is absolutely outside, you know, depending on the way that you take that, it's a, you know, it can also be seen as a very kind of trapping kind of thought. You know, there's a Kantian sort of structure of the interior where everything that you thought of the outside is actually inside, you know. So you think you can escape in space or you can escape in time or there's some causal process of escape. And Kant says, no, no, no, you know, space is all on the inside. Time is all on the inside. Causality is all on the inside.
All of these, the difference between the inside and the outside is not demarcated within these forms. The form itself is the structure of the inside. So there is something, you know, there's a moment that is very ambiguous between being, you know, it defines what liberation or exit would be in a way that obviously can be taken to be an extreme moment of confinement and you know just absolute metaphysical claustrophobic imprisonment that all the dimensions of potential escape are themselves folded into interiority
and I think that this is exactly what is going on in this movie you know like I think that there's a really strong degree to which it has structural echoes with Apocalypse Now you know Trent is Willard Cain is Kurtz Trent is going on this journey to the end of the river what seems like insanity at the beginning becomes something that actually is enveloping at the end and obviously the end of the river moment like the moment equivalent to the encounter with Kurtz in Apocalypse Now is happens in a church where we see Sutter Cain for the first
time uh he's typing writing finishing the book but all the time structures are very delirious so you can't take too much from that um and um what we have there is this absolute then this drama of exactly the kind that you're saying it's a drama about escape confinement imprisonment you know um Because obviously one element of that is that everything is inside the story. So it's like that has this structure of imprisonment and confinement.
It's why you can't get out of Hobbes End, because of the fact that it's all sort of folded into this book. and this amazing scene with, mostly with Stiles and Sutter Cain, where some of the most important lines in the movie, I mean, if I can just read out just a little bit of the dialogue or Sutter Cain here. Please. He says, it's funny, isn't it? For years, I thought I was making all this up, but they were telling me what to write. so we could stop there i mean but i think i'd rather come back to it because i think it's like a really important bunch of things going on there uh then he pauses giving me the power to make it
all real now it is all those horrible slimy things trying to get back in come see the instrument of the homecoming now this is his book what you have been looking for the new bible it starts the change and so he then there's this scene which is weirdly kind of horribly sort of a mixture of like metaphysics and eroticism and whatever where he's with styles there's this weird sort of sexual tension he sort of grabs her by the back of the head and then push pushes her face down so she is looking at the book and just sort of ingests it in this sort of single revelatory moment.
He says, do you like my ending? You know, after looking up from the book, she has blood seeping from her eyeballs. So, you know, this is all about the stuff that you're talking about, I think, completely. And the crucial thing here in terms of this question about escape is, yes, we have all these structures of extreme metaphysical imprisonment going on here. And this basic metaphysical structure of the movie, of course, being this whole thing about everything being folded into the book. But at the same time, you have, I think,
really one of the greatest cinematic depictions of the absolute outside that you can find anywhere, which is just that the church now is sort of changed into this philosophical structure, you know, by what Siddharth Cain is saying, by the fact that you're understanding that the kind of space isn't real space. You can't get out of Hobbes and you can't get out of the church. It's all, it's not that kind of spatiality. It's not the kind of speciality that you can just take a road out from. The church has become this completely encapsulating philosophical prison. And so the walls of the church no longer open out into the world.
Instead, beyond the walls of the church is the outside. It's Lovecraft outside. It's the thing itself. It's Kant's absolute outside. You know, it's not a spatially accessible outside. And the outside is just pressing on the walls of the church and the doors and the windows are all covered with wooden, whatever they're called. Oh, God, I've just totally, you know, wooden covers over the windows. And through them is just this kind of seepage coming through. You can't really tell, you know, like all those horrible slimy things
trying to get back in. There's this seepage, which is just the index on the inside of this thing, they, on the outside, which you just know now at this point in the movie. You're not going to see those things. It would make no sense to see them. All you can see is what is pressing in from the absolute outside, this kind of slimy, infiltrating, pressurizing assault that is breaking down the barriers of interiority.
And so I think that, you know, in that vision is the most extreme, like, exit is being captured, you know, with a strength that you cannot improve upon. It's absolutely getting what a real exit into reality rather than a phantasmatic, phenomenal exit would be. Because what we're seeing is just the complete alien nature of what is outside this structure of interiority.
what i find so interesting about um that particular moment in the film and when uh trent is uh you know attempting to escape the the kind of shadowed monsters behind him is that um in a uh more straightforward lovecraftian depiction this would be the moment where trent fully loses his grip on reality um but he doesn't as as we know because uh at the beginning of the film, as you had already mentioned, he, uh, excuse me, I just dropped my microphone. Um, at the beginning of the film, he, he, uh, repeatedly asserts that, that, that he, that he, uh, is not insane in a sort of, uh, attempt to convince them that he is insane so that he's able
to stay safely within the asylum. Um, but we don't actually see him fully lose his grip on, the reality that he was previously beholden to until the very final shot of the movie. Yeah. Which I would love to get your thoughts on, because I find that particular shot of him in the movie theater watching the film adaptation of the novel In the Mouth of Madness to be so powerful and hilarious and really kind of deeply disturbing all at the same time. No, it's awesome, truly. And it's obviously something that, you know, is a really strong thread running right through.
And it was definitely part of what, you know, was behind me saying this insistent element in the movie is about how things look from the other side. Because in a scene, you know, what is it? When he's watching the movie, obviously he's seeing himself. There's all of the sort of redoubled, actually, you know, turbulent process of this kind of self-referential momentum of, you know, there's a hoarding up on the sort of entrance to the cinema saying, in the mouth of madness, start with John Trent. And as you say, he goes in, he watches the movie.
But what is the scene that he's looking at is a scene from which we've obviously already seen earlier in the movie, very close to the kind of consummating moment with Sutter Cain in the church, where I think it's Mr. Pickman, some bad dude, anyways, you know, minutes before shooting himself, is talking to Trent and sorry, just one second. Yeah, he says that this guy saying,
you know, very much in the whole Sadochean metaphysical space, I can't remember which came first, us or the book. And then trent then says insist shouts you need an exclamation mark for it this is not reality this is not reality you know the guy at the time then says reality is not what it used to be you know and shoots himself but then when we have this scene at the end what john trent is watching himself saying over and you know this is not reality he as as the actor on the screen this is not reality this is not reality and of course you know the doubling that's now happened by the fact he's watching himself and he's now laughing kind of insanely at himself making that declaration
you know so it's that again it's like it seems to me it's clearly like um it has a lot of philosophical contact you know if you're going to have a line that you're going to be looking at and laughing at and deriding this is not reality that is a really interesting uh choice for that and he's now seeing it from the other side he's laughing like a maniac um because uh you know he's he's seeing you know what were you thinking uh what did you mean by that he he's he's laughing at his own delusion at the moment that that was said.
So, you know, I think it's totally right what you're saying. You know, he doesn't, in a Lovecraftian fashion, just go screaming insane at the moment when you think he would. Instead, he's saying, he's saying, this is no reality. it's an adamant refusal of insanity but it's that adamant refusable insanity that is actually the thing that is being derided as delusion in the final scene and i think you know links back to this thing at the start it's the same trent watching the movie is the trent who says the first thing we hear him say i'm not insane i'm not insane extremely unconvincingly of course you
You know, you're supposed to be laughing. You're supposed to be watching, laughing at him saying that. He seems obviously insane when you first see him. But by the time you've gone around the whole loop, it's at the point, it's the refusal of insanity that is shown to be the actual stage of delusion. And I can't help but get to this point because we're operating on some decidedly Deleuze-Gotharian frameworks here. Madness is the operative word in the title, I would say. And so I guess I want to know what, if any, significance does that concept hold for you as it pertains to, obviously as it pertains to this work, but as well as just your own?
um well I don't know yeah it's interesting I mean I think it's obviously completely appropriate I mean the movie is definitely about madness and you know that is as everyone completely named to say of course you know one of its kind of uh anchor points with the whole lovecraftian um mythos and i suppose that um
you know if you're going to convert it again it's sort of quasi philosophical terms it's really like I think the topic here is a critique in a completely most rigorous sense that you want to give that word of sanity is the actual philosophical process that we see in this movie, but also in these philosophical references. And sanity meaning that one has a model of reality that is actually simply the structure of interiority generalized.
And so as soon as there's a kind of, you know, as that is pointed out, there is something that is actually kind of insane already happening. You know, I think transcendental philosophy is inescapably quite insane. I think the natural response to it or to anything like it is to say don't be crazy what does it even mean to talk about something outside space so yeah
that's the sense in which I think madness is working here that is very continuous with its its usage in more philosophical contexts sure um the the the final question that i have uh particularly uh as it pertains to the film uh and i should have mentioned this earlier but but uh my goal is to kind of have these be around an hour and be a little bit more digestible if that's if that's all right with you sure um so uh i i want to specifically talk about, you know, Carpenter's vision of the end as it, as it, you know, relates to not even just his own films, but, but, you know, the broader kind of apocalyptic tradition in fiction. What do you find appealing about Carpenter's depiction of the end here,
as opposed to, you know, maybe other, you know, Lovecraftian or otherwise depictions of the end? Oh, did I lose you? Well, no. I'm just trying to think, you know, in a weird way, I'm trying to think of a Lovecraftian story that is really classically apocalyptic. I mean, I think there definitely is an apocalyptic system at a deeper level, but there's not many sort of end times scenarios that I can that I can think of I mean maybe they're sort of you know they're sort of threatened
kind of implicitly but I mean I think actually Carpenter is much more biblical you know he's biblical in the kind of in a strict way you know that in the book of Revelation at the end of the world, the universe rolls up like a scroll. You know, I mean, the revelation, apocalypse, the fake, the world of appearances being exposed as a media construct and unraveling or being rolled up and discarded.
so it's definitely it's a media event already you know in the bible and I think that Carpenter is pushing that in this movie more than anything else he's done as far as I'm aware it's like apocalypse as a media event is totally central to it well and how and how notable it is that the events that lead up to them actually discovering Sutter Cain are revealed midway through the film to be part of an elaborate publicity stunt for the promotion of Cain's film. Yes, totally. No, that's really important and interesting. And it's obviously a huge thing in the history of Western occultism
That that slippage between trickery and genuine occult phenomena is a really important theme. You know, like, I think it's typical of the major occultists to have been charlatans as well as, you know, occult, occultists, serious occultists. I think that the notion that, you know, you show something was charlatanry and therefore you can see there's nothing more going on there is the innocent but misleading move that, you know, is tempting.
And it's obviously that move that is being played with, as you say, in this movie, that, you know, just because it's a publicity stunt, that's not the end of the story. That's what, you know, for years I thought I was making all this up, but they were telling me what to write. so the actual characters operating on the inside are operating as agents of the outside that doesn't require that they have lucid comprehension of what they're doing and they can even think that what they're doing is trickery and deception but it's trickery and
deception that they're doing as puppets of the real process from the outside which which is even to uh which is uh one of the ideas that i love so much about this film is that uh when when kane is revealed to be merely just kind of a vessel for for the flooding in of the outside into our reality i think that's uh that's such a that's such a compelling idea that the that the that the ostensible villain of the film uh is really not even the agent of all of this destruction so much as a vessel for it. Yes. I just find to be really electrifying. It's done brilliantly well
as well. That whole thing where he tears off his face is another absolutely great movie. I think... Because in terms of obviously the structures of illusion that are being dismantled into insanity, one of them is the reality of the empirical ego, of the, you know, one's own naturalistic psychological self-identification as a as a human person um is just gets uh obliterated in this in this tide um coming from the outside thank you so much for listening and an additional thank you to nick once again for agreeing to chat this episode featured music from drain puppet as well as clips from the film
I have other guests in the works and while I can't necessarily guarantee a weekly episode, I hope to at least be able to have a few new interviews per month. If you'd like to support these efforts, there's a PayPal link in the description otherwise, thank you again so much and see you next time