Horror Films, Free Speech, and Female Desires: A Conversation with Mary Wild

What happens when we merge the worlds of horror cinema and psychoanalysis? Join us for an enlightening conversation with Freudian cinephile and podcaster, Mary Wild, as we unravel the synergy between these two powerful forces. Delve into the realm of horror films and their connections to psychoanalytic theory.

As we explore the depths of horror cinema, we also confront the controversial subject of free speech and fandom culture within the film industry. Uncover our thoughts on the growing trend of moral censorship and the pressures creators face to follow certain guidelines. Additionally, we discuss the potential political motivations behind right-wing claims of being 'pro-free speech' and the evolving landscape of sexuality in modern culture.

Finally, join us as we dive into the intersection of film and literary theory, examining the works of iconic directors like Tarkovsky and David Lynch. Discover their unique approach to filmmaking and how they tap into the power of film to create immersive, dream-like experiences. We also touch on the unexpected success of Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey, considering the rare representation of female sexuality as the driving force of the stories, and how this has sparked analysis and discussion. Don't miss this captivating episode as we journey through the world of psychoanalyzing horror cinema with Mary Wild.


Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip  ( @aufhebenkultur )
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @skepoet
Facebook
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

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Psychoanalyzing Horror Cinema

C. Derick Varn 0:48

Hello and welcome to Varmuok . and today I'm with Mary Wilde , a Freudian cinephile . She is a podcaster and regular lecturer for the Freud Museum in London , that's right . And you are one of the few people who come across my audio listening habits in multiple forms , because , as a left-winger in America , somehow we always end up having to deal with psychoanalysis . And as a horror film fan , you are a regular on evolution of horror , where you give a Freudian takes on cinema pieces .

Mary Wild 1:38

That's right . Yes , i kind of know what you mean . I think I'm probably receiving posts in the similar feeds that you are as well . But yeah , it's nice to be able to get across those different audiences .

C. Derick Varn 2:00

Yeah , i mean you've interviewed some of the same people I've interviewed . Most recently , i think it was Duyman Rowe , who does the critique of techno-optimism .

Mary Wild 2:11

Yes , yes , i think . maybe also am I right in thinking you might have also spoken to Daniel Tat .

C. Derick Varn 2:19

Yeah , Daniel and I . I've spoken to Daniel several times .

Mary Wild 2:23

Yes .

C. Derick Varn 2:25

So , interestingly , if you'd have talked to me 10 years ago , i was a skeptical and psychoanalysis , And that has changed because I have changed what I think its function is And what I mean by that is . I think it does give a fairly good , thick description of the way a lot of people experience psychological states phenomenologically , and so it also is very useful for analyzing any kind of art that deals in the psychological space in a way that , like I don't know , i've seen people try to apply , for example , classical music , like neurology , to film , and it is the most unilluminating thing , i think .

Mary Wild 3:17

I've dealt with .

C. Derick Varn 3:23

Yeah .

Mary Wild 3:24

Yeah , i do agree with that . I mean , i personally relate to psychoanalysis purely theoretically . I'm not a practitioner , i don't see patients or anything like that . I have before undergone psychoanalysis for about a year and then kind of moved out of that and into EMDR therapy , which is which is a much more like accelerated form of psychoanalysis , and so I think that it is quite useful for me , more theoretically than in the clinic .

Mary Wild 4:04

I love relying on it as a framework to approach all different types of art forms , but cinema in particular , because I think that it encourages us to view the film material as really like a projective test , which is also why I named my lecture series projections And I also co host a podcast called projections , because it's really about kind of like more emphasizing the fact that the viewing experience is so subjective And if we come to it in a more active way rather than just passive entertainment , it gives us really an opportunity to like get in touch with all kinds of like unconscious impulses or conflicts that we're obviously unaware of , and we're able to kind of like process those things and work through those things through the cinematic experience . So it has like a , it offers like a really positive benefit in that sense .

C. Derick Varn 5:11

And it leads me to you know , talk to you about where your work tends to focus on genre film , specifically horror , but genre film in general , although I've heard you talk about other kinds of film and your analysis so clearly you're working on just limited to that . But why do you think our in specific is analyzable with these rubrics and what's going on in specific to that genre that makes it more immediately applicable ?

Mary Wild 5:48

Yeah , i mean I think that what's happening in horror is we're being presented oftentimes with subjects that are taboo in mainstream normie culture . Obviously there's an argument to be made that there is a specific type of horror film that is designed to be also very mainstream and popular , and maybe those are just more digestible and palatable . But I'm talking about , in general , this spirit of the horror genre is that it is intentionally trying to bring us into confront some dark topics or subjects or present scenarios that might be like disturbing or , you know , disconcerting , whatever , and the very fact of that puts us into , i believe I second analytics space because it's forcing us to work against the mechanism of repression . It's really like you know it is , it's deliberately confronting and it's deliberately provocative into us , looking at and bringing into just awareness content that normally would just get repressed or put out of our mind And it's sort of , in a way , acting against the ego . You know , it's acting against that facilitating function of our personality that is pretending that it's okay , and horror is not allowing us to pretend , it's not allowing us to curate this fake facade of positivity .

Mary Wild 7:29

It's literally putting us in a state of considering sometimes the worst , and I think that is an ought to be the aim of psychoanalysis always to encourage a practice of bringing into consciousness things that we would automatically want to suppress . And I think this is really perhaps why there is like a natural synergy between psychoanalysis and a lot of leftist thinkers , because the whole idea is that , you know , we ought to be more critical , we ought to be considering these things that management , ie the ego , doesn't want us to think about . We ought to be thinking about the class struggle , we ought to be thinking about all these conflicts that are put out of mind , out of sight and like sanitized , and we have to pretend that those , those conflicts and hostilities don't exist . And psychoanalysis encourages us to do the opposite . In a way , it's very avant garde . It's very , very out of step with the message of neoliberal culture , which is to pretend that everything is okay .

C. Derick Varn 8:45

Yeah , I think I think it's interesting to think about the economic context of horror and the psychological context in that as well , because one of the things that makes the Freudian analytic of psychoanalysis so useful to me when I approach film is that it gives us a way to understand implicit conflicts and also maybe the larger context for those implicit conflicts , and some of them are obviously primal . They're not just , you know , class inculcated , but I think it's it also and maybe this is , you know , self justification on my part but one of the complaints about horror is that it's almost inherently reactionary genre And I don't think that's true . But I also I think it becomes clear that it's not true when you look at , like , say , the psychoanalytic functions of a horror film versus , say , a purely moral , didactic , you know universe of a slasher maybe , which I think is where the the idea that horror is reactionary comes from .

Mary Wild 10:20

Yeah , sorry can I just ask you , like from your perspective , like what is this argument even rooted in ? like why are people , why are some people saying that horror is a reactionary Um ?

C. Derick Varn 10:36

I suspect one is that there there's a deep seated distrust of institutionalization and in horror There's also the you know , there many of the tropes superficially are like if we look at , like , the development of the slasher movie in the 80s , we see it going from relatively a moral actually into punishment for , for , for , particularly women , stepping outside of sexual norms , and it seemed to reinforce that and not critique that , which I think is a very simple reading . It's . It's something that I heard when I was in graduate school that I thought was ludicrous , but it's interesting because one it doesn't really square . What if you actually look up a lot of hard directors politics ? they tend to be , broadly speaking , left liberal , yeah , and to I don't think that the spaces is unproblematized as as that . I think horror , more than say science fiction or fantasy , where I think the didactic elements of it are a little bit more explicit tends to have , tends to work on discongruity , so much that it's almost impossible to say that it's like politically one thing or another .

Mary Wild 12:27

Okay , sure , yeah .

C. Derick Varn 12:31

So I guess this brings me to a lot of your Freudian analysis . It's one of my favorite parts of the Evolution of Horror podcast and it's why I started listening to the projection .

Mary Wild 12:43

Oh , thank you .

C. Derick Varn 12:48

And one of the easy things about this show is it's both . It's not our tour driven , as most of these kinds of shows are oriented , it's not not either . But that I mean it's not like we don't talk about , like singular director , they don't talk about singular director's visions or whatever , but it's very subgenre organized and historically organized . How does how does that ? how did that help you organize your thoughts around ? like particular films are particular psychoanalytic approaches to a given work , because it was organized kind of differently than say , oh , we're trying to understand the the framework of an art tour , which you also do , but yeah , i mean .

Mary Wild 13:43

So my way of working is like , i guess , for the Evolution of Horror podcast . In that context , obviously , as you know , mike organizes his seasons across subgenres And you know he programs a few dozen films per season and then , ahead of the launch of the new season , he'll share that list with me and say , oh , which one of these do you do feel more like drawn to for a psychoanalytic reconstruction ? And I I've been now doing them like I do 10 per season . So I select the 10 that I feel are the most , i guess , you know , full of potential in terms of what they might be communicating . Second , politically , and so I mean one , once or twice I've had to , like switch titles around . If I start to analyze something and I feel like I haven't got enough to say about it . Now , that's not to say that the film itself is not fully amenable to a psychoanalytic study . Sometimes that just means that , purely subjectively , i'm not finding enough of a pattern for discussion within it , and that's purely a reflection of me , you know , and what I'm projecting onto it . But so first , you know it's , firstly it has to be said that what I'm creating , those segments I'm creating for his podcast , ultimately are a reflection of my own subjective , you know , baggage , whatever you want to call it . So I never , ever intend those to be , like you know , a final analysis or a definitive interpretation of the works .

Mary Wild 15:33

I . That's why I always trust like . I'm not a film critic myself . That's not how I like to operate or identify . There's certainly a time and a place for film critics . It's just not the type of work that I'm doing .

Mary Wild 15:45

I'm more of , you could say . I like to use the analogy of I'm like , i'm like a tarot card interpreter , but for films . So , you know , i'm able to construct a narrative And it's very subjective and fluid And it's sort of like there's more vibrancy , i like to think in it , and movement . And it's not meant to be fixed , if anything , it's more meant to be an advocacy for the reliance on the second edit concepts and framework and technique and promoting those to two spectators , to listeners of that podcast , and say This is what I'm doing with this . But you can , then , if you're learning about these techniques over time , you can subjectively utilize them yourself to gain personal meaning that's , you know , relevant to you . So I'm more working like that in that sense , and what ended up happening is that you know I I mean , i've also never thought of myself as a writer .

Mary Wild 16:56

I'm more of a kind of like media , like visual media person .

Mary Wild 17:00

When I deliver lectures for the Freud Museum , i use a lot of clips . I write , you know , in PowerPoint I'm not like a traditional author or writer . But for Mike and his podcast , after a while I ended up with loads of segments , you know , having produced them and they are scripted , i perform them , i narrate them , and I just found myself in the end with like a whole bunch of segments and it seemed only right to collect them and pitch them as a book , like a collective study of second houses and horror films , which I ended up doing for Rutledge and I signed the book deal with that , which is what I'm working on now . So that is also a big transition for me to go from purely a lecture and podcaster , you know , like a talker , i'm a watcher and a talker , i'm not a reader and a writer , you know . So that it's a big transition for me to move away , strictly speaking , from only watching and talking to now writing and making that a bit more formalized . So it's something that I'm adjusting to at the moment .

C. Derick Varn 18:12

So how have you found the process of converting what were prewritten and prepared segments into a longer text ? I say this is a person who made the kind of opposite journey . I'm naturally I'm , by training , a poet And that's what I publish in And people would similarly . People would try to , and still try to , get me to write nonfiction . I had a burnout when I was a university lecturer on writing academic papers because I realized no one read them And literally no one read them once once they got past the reviewers in the conference circuit that they were untouched in general . So I kind of walked away from that and discovered that I was actually as much a talker And that's actually part of how I process that element . So , but I find it interesting Is it hard to convert something that was written specifically like that for one project and and and change it into not , it doesn't like it's a book link argument , but it's kind of a book link series of treatments , right , that still does require significant revision and whatnot .

Preserving Intimacy in Horror Writing

Mary Wild 19:44

Yes , absolutely . So it does require , yes , revision and , i guess , an effort to make it more streamlined , as a text is not just , you know , a segment for a show , it's now kind of part of a bigger picture which is written down . So there needs to be some , certainly , you know , some adjustments made and some adaptations . But ultimately , what ? what I'm sort of , i suppose , aiming for and what really inspired me in my writing journey , has been the text , the wonderful book House of Psychotic Women by Kira Janisse , in which she also is looking at a number of different titles . I mean , in my book I'll be , i'll be covering 100 titles in 100 films over 10 chapters organized around sub genres . So in that way structurally similar to my ex podcast . But in Kira Janisse's book , house of Psychotic Women , she , i think she examines well over 100 titles .

Mary Wild 20:58

I don't want to I don't quite recall how many in total , but she's also sort of navigating a vast , you know number of films , but she's writing about it in a very free , associative way . In her case it's much more like personal , where she's comparing certain moments or iconic scenes in these horror films and relating them to her own you know background . She had a very troubled upbringing , etc . A lot of things happened in her past that she feels is cathartically spoken about in relation to horror cinema . So , and I really like the effect that that produces , because it feels very intimate and very like revealing about the authors , i guess , like mindset and what she's , what she is really getting from the horror genre . And while I'm not using that kind of autobiographical , autobiographical information , really in my work I'm trying to convey a similar kind of intimate tone , which I don't know , i don't even know if that's coming across in the , in the segments , but I think maybe in the segments , because there's that kind of spoken word , you know , like narrated dimension of them , because it's on a podcast If you're hearing my voice it's coming from me and I do try and speak very intentionally on there .

Mary Wild 22:38

Maybe the intimacy is being conveyed at that level . But in the text I'm trying to explore the possibility of integrating that intimacy because there's no other dimension , there is no audio , you know , it's just the text . So I don't want it to feel detached or overly academic or dry . And again , you know there's the time and the place for that to like . I'm not trying to disparage academic work at all . It's just not at all my style and it's not my , it's not a reflective of me and the work that I'm doing . So that's what I would say is in the , in the adaptation process , i'm very conscious and intentional in preserving the element of intimacy , because I think that horse in the mat , naturally , is about that . You know , there it is about almost like the trauma of intimacy , so I want to make sure that's present .

C. Derick Varn 23:38

Hmm , it's interesting to think about converting that because I would say your , your clips on Mike show really do have that feel , but some of that's also , you know , intonation , voice and both interest words which will come across in writing , but also literally in voice , which might not . How has that ? has that been hard to capture ?

Mary Wild 24:15

Yes , it's been a challenge , for sure , it's really been a challenge . It's made me very conscious of how I'm writing and the decisions I'm making in terms of style and presentation , because , you know , my lecture series at the Freud Museum has going , has been going on now for over 10 years , you know , even all through coven and lockdown we were still running them , but online , you know . So I've just really settled in a way , into the comfort of presenting and speaking and reacting to an audience and podcasting and having that element of voice And those things are stripped away and it's just your words on a paper . It becomes , you know , it's sort of very stark . It feels very , i feel very like it's a strange , like ambivalent experience of feeling both very exposed and yet struggling to like , reveal myself . It's very , it's a very , it's a kind of strange and liminal , ambiguous space , and so , you know , it has , it has certainly , like , caused me to think about it very philosophically and I spent a lot of hours , even more hours than you know , then I want to admit thinking more about the style than even writing , because it's really my first time doing a project like this , and so what I really want to make sure is that I preserve the things that I cherish the most in the way that I like to communicate , which is things like irony . You know , that kind of sense of playfulness . I don't know if you remember but the best example of this is my segment on predator , because I spent a long time reading out all the different weapons that that feature in both predator you know , predator one and two And I want , so I want to preserve that .

Mary Wild 26:30

I wanted to be like a little bit tongue in cheek ironic is sometimes sarcastic , but also being very playful with what psychoanalysis in a way does best , which is to be a bit , you know , kind of a bit sexually playful . You know there's so much , there's there's so many opportunities for , you know , double entendre , triple entendre , you know , like so many layers of meaning that we're working with in psychoanalysis and a lot of it is erotically charged And I want to make sure that that is maintained and sustained in my writing that there's so much going on and especially horror cinema that is dealing with , you know , sexual anxiety or you know , jouissance or the death drive , and I want to make sure that my language treats that , sometimes humorously , sometimes more seriously , but never , but never , strays away from that taboo element of the erotic . So I want , you know , i kind of want it to be dirty , you know , a little bit dirty , a little bit playful , like a suggestive provocative , because I think that's doing it justice . You know , that's what I aspire to do .

C. Derick Varn 27:55

That makes a lot of sense And that's that's hard to do in writing . I'm not going to lie , like it's something I also try to do sometimes and it doesn't always work . Um , it's . That also leads me to a different question . That wasn't expecting to ask you , but we currently are experiencing a cinema that even a horror cinema that , at least on the surface , tries to be oddly sexless . Yes , and there are reasons for that that I am supported of , but I do feel like in film it It makes adult relationships being portrayed at all I mean , i don't just mean sexual ones but very difficult to do . Yes , how , how have people responded to what you do in that atmosphere ? And I guess the second part of that question is why do you think that atmosphere is so dominant ?

Mary Wild 29:13

I recognize completely . What you're saying is something that I've observed to like , particularly around , like this discourse on . You know , like sexuality and film being gratuitous , that we need to do away with Sex scenes and we need to like clean up film in the , you know , the cinema , etc . Well , i mean , i also understand the reasons for that impulse coming about , obviously like , post me to , and certainly post the revelation of so much corruption , you know , in the film industry , especially in Hollywood , people taking , taking advantage , etc . Producers being found out to have , you know , committed sexual assault . I understand where that impulse is coming from , but my proposition is that the solution is not less representation of sex . My , my proposition is that the solution is more representation of sex because of , you know , those kinds of like violations that come into the collective consciousness . They bring about a repressive force in the culture where we think that , because of , you know , bad behavior , criminal behavior that we , you know , all rightly condemn , that we must in a way hide away our sexuality . In response to that , that in some ways we have to , you know , build a fortress around ourselves , metaphorically , you know , and and and simply deny the erotic impulse because it creates or leads to dangerous situations . But Psychoanalysis tells us that that is a very harmful thing to do . You know that the prohibition on the erotic impulse really just leads to , like neurosis and a very , very captured , very mortified culture . I mean at the individual level . It causes psychopathology . Culturally it produces , you know , just kind of like a hellish place , a landscape to live in . you know , not interesting , not provocative , not progressive and boring , you know , boring as hell .

Mary Wild 31:57

I'm very pro sex in movies . I the more the better . You know , the I don't care if it's aligned with the narrative , with the logic and plot of the film . If it just happens out of the blue and it's not connected to any other scene , i don't care and I don't mind , because actually that is how sex occurs in real life . Sometimes you have sex , whether you know , solo sex or partnered sex , and it's just a lightning bolt of spontaneity in your day , has nothing to do with the rest of your life and it's just part of life And if movies are depicting that , that's so be it . It shouldn't , there should not be justification for the inclusion and incorporation and integration of eros into a film .

Mary Wild 32:46

Also , i , you know , i don't mind admitting that the way that I approach cinema , you know , cinema , i'm a film lover , I get scopophilic pleasure from looking . You know , i believe I have a theory that all true film lovers are warriors , really because of the eroticized dimension of looking , and that goes across genders . I don't believe it's simply just men who are turned on by watching movies . And when I say turned on , i don't mean like genitally , i mean not necessarily just that , i mean , you know , turned on in the true second , in the least sense . You know , erotically moved , animated . you know that life force that it kind of brings us a spring in our step because we've watched something exciting . And I think that is , you know , it's worthy enough to mention And . And so from my perspective , i'm also happened to be very much like pro pornography . I , you know , i accept film in all its capacities . I don't , i don't discriminate against pornography . It's a type of cinema and it's a legitimate form of cinema .

Mary Wild 33:55

There's obviously people who and you know people who happen to be like feminists and make the the argument that it's harmful to women , etc . We hear these arguments made that pornography is exploitative . We can make that argument about any class of profession , any , any area of work . Of course bad things occur in the field of pornography , but harm also is committed in other fields of work . We know that If you , if you , want to reduce exploitation , you should really make the argument that there should be a more honest stock take of harm committed in porn . And what are we going to do to reduce the harm ? The argument that is made is that there is harm , therefore we should ban the profession , and I find that very curious because that same argument is not made about other professions . So what is it you know specifically about porn that it should be singled out , as you know , universally harmful .

Mary Wild 34:58

And of course , the second one . The answer is that it's because it's sexually upfront . You know , it prevents us from repressing our sexuality because it's so in your face It's just showing you sex on the screen . I'm going on a bit of a tangent , i'm sorry , but I guess I'm trying to say that I do understand the impulse to make the arguments the kind of anti sex argument , but I simply think that that that way madness lies Truly . I think that the answer is more sexuality , more as particularly , representation of feminine juicense , which is still sorely lacking , and an inclusion and integration of feminine pleasure on film , and I feel like that is actually materially more empowering than simply denying the possibility of sex .

C. Derick Varn 35:58

That makes a lot of sense to me . However , do know that my audience is going to probably be split on the response to that . I don't really care , frankly , but but , but I know how left this is the one issue , one of the few issues , even in the broadly feminist left , where the responses are are polarized , internally as well as externally .

Mary Wild 36:24

Of course .

C. Derick Varn 36:25

So it's , and I think that's that's that in of itself , is interesting to me . We could talk about , you know , we could talk about repressive apparatus in general . Do you feel like we are living in a particularly repressive moment , or is this kind of a historical norm that it shows up in different ways ?

Mary Wild 36:52

Yeah , i mean , it's so hard to compare because every era and every zeitgeist has its preoccupations and neurotic obsessions . But I just , i guess I can only speak . As you know , i'm a genaxer And when I was growing up , the people who were demanding that cultural art forms be banned were like sort of evangelical religious types who were talking about like rock and roll being like music of the devil , kind of thing , you know , and it was like , you know , the moralists or the kind of the police , the policing force of culture seem to be coming from almost exclusively from the right , you know , whereas now , i mean I also identify as a leftist , i mean , actually I'm an , i would say I'm , i'm , i'm a sort of like left wing anarchist , you know , it's like I suppose you could say like anarcho socialist , whatever , anarcho syndicalist I like that title better .

Free Speech and Cinema Fandom Culture

Mary Wild 38:11

But I , you know , i simply like , when I see certain groups in the cult , in the culture , calling for the boycott or banning or suppressing of content on moral grounds , i'm kind of surprised to see that oftentimes it's people who call themselves like left liberal . That seems so alien to me , you know , because growing up it was always more right wingers who were anti free speech or very kind of prohibitive .

Mary Wild 38:44

So it seems to have , like I guess , reversed , and it's something that I find very curious and I don't fully understand that impulse , because growing up , as I said , i always thought that leftists were much more like libertarian , and not in the , not in a right wing libertarian sense , but more like about freedom and about expression , you know . So maybe I'm just naive , maybe I've missed something , something so fundamental It's just passed me by . I don't know what happened , but , and it also really annoys me that , like right wingers now go around calling themselves , you know , pro free speech , and now suddenly they've got that I guess you know title or whatever and they brag about how they're so permissive and they're so . And it's like what's going on and I don't understand here . Maybe you can explain it to me , but you know much better . I really don't understand . But I guess I don't know whether this time , this particular moment today is , is particularly repressive or regressive , but to me it feels like you know , I always say I'm interested in cinema .

Mary Wild 40:01

That's where I'm what I'm most thinking about , and what really annoys me is when there's pressure put upon filmmakers and artists to create according to certain guidelines and that they have to follow a certain message in order to be accepted and if they don't , then they're sort of canceled or whatever . You know , and to me this is the ultimate , i guess , offense , because I think of filmmaking as such a sacred art where people are working through their own shit and we should just leave them alone and we shouldn't be prescriptive about what they make . And that's maybe more . My concern is , you know , it's like that movie , misery , where Annie Wilkes ties the author to the bed and forces him to write like the novel that she wants , you know , and I just can't help but think that we're living in an era where people on Twitter are all just like Annie Wilkes and they're shrieking and demanding that artists do things to follow their moral guidelines , and I just think that's bullshit .

C. Derick Varn 41:13

Yeah , i think one thing I will say when right wingers not necessarily across the board , but when right wingers tell me about free speech , when I see what they do at the state level in America , i pretty much know they're full of shit for sure . And that's you know , as a person who lives in the state which may have the most restrictive internet laws in the United States now .

Mary Wild 41:39

Oh , my God .

C. Derick Varn 41:43

Like going so far as to require an ID if they actually can implement this , i'm not sure they can to access any social media requiring similar things in regards to the access of pornography , etc . The idea that the right is , broadly speaking , pro free speech seems to be a political stunt , which wasn't . that has happened before . I think that the prior example is like that you're talking about free speech a lot in Britain , but in I don't know where you grew up , your accent is completely non-placeable .

Mary Wild 42:31

I grew up in Montreal .

C. Derick Varn 42:33

Okay , okay , so , yeah . So you grew up in North America And , and thus evangelicals were probably the bigger concern . I grew up in Georgia , where they , like literally dominated everything in my childhood My first . I had a first edition of of like interview with a vampire as a 14 year old and I loaned it to a friend and their evangelical parents burned it .

Mary Wild 43:03

Oh , my God .

C. Derick Varn 43:04

So wow , and I am also a Gen Xer . So barely I'm in that weird liminal space of being born in 1980 .

Mary Wild 43:15

But , but , Oh , you're two years younger than me .

C. Derick Varn 43:21

Yeah , so so I I culturally kind of under understand millennials , in that I grew up with the internet and that way . But And so part of it , i think , is fan culture , which is highly entitled .

C. Derick Varn 43:44

But I do think we're in a weird moment in regards to sexuality because on one hand , we talk about it more openly than ever and porn is ubiquitous . On the other hand , we don't talk about sex directly hardly at all . Yeah , so it's like we're having fights over over sexuality while not really talking about sex . and in the case of younger people and I say this because I'm also a teacher , i'm gonna be very careful about how I say this but there does seem to be a distinct lack of interest , at least in the things that we would normally associate with signs of beginning to engage in sexuality , such as dating . My students don't date . It's in that kind of wild . So there's lots of discussions of like . even in a fairly conservative place like Lucheson , there's a lot of backlash against this . There's a lot of discussions of gender and sexual identity , but like , no discussion of sexuality being attached to that at all , including amongst the students themselves .

C. Derick Varn 45:14

I'm an English teacher . students always confess to me that's , unfortunately , one of the backdoor things about the job that you don't realize until you do it . Yeah , but you give people pen and paper and they'll tell you almost everything , sean , but it's interesting how lacking that is . What are the other interesting things . I wanted to . we'll get to specific cinema in a minute but as a person who engages with this on the internet and in an area that has become more respectable from intellectuals , i mean like there are a lot more intellectual studying horror now than when I was in university , for example , and wasn't unheard of them , but it was . it was pretty rare outside of literature , how , let me first . The other thing about horror , though on a lot of genre cinema , is they do have fandoms around them . How has fandoms and scholarship intersecting kind of worked out for you doing an analysis of film ?

Mary Wild 46:33

Sure , i mean I feel like I belong to a few fandoms , because I'm definitely So . If you've heard my podcast Projections , my co-host , sarah , she'll always say that she doesn't fangirl around the particular director . She's more about sometimes obscure titles that she'll really admire and gravitate towards , but rarely will she just be totally in awe of a particular director . But I'm the exact opposite . I will . I really latch on to a director and I just feel so invested and just kind of I don't mind telling you like Kind of worshipful . You know , like when I enter , when I dive headlong into the filmography of a director I love , it's just such a joy for me because I feel like I'm inhabiting their mind , because you just get this repetition of so much that recurs across their film and that's really how you end up as a director with your own language that people recognize . You know people say , oh , that's lynchion . What they mean is that they've seen this particular thing , this object or symbol or a storyline several times . But why has it occurred several times ? Because that director is obsessed with it . It's like being in the analytic session in the clinic and you tell the same story over and over again , kind of infuriatingly , covering the same ground And maybe in the moment that feels futile and even like hellish , because you feel you're not making progress . But over time , if you're applying that obsession and that preoccupation into your work and pouring it into your work , developing it as a language that you revisit constantly , that is a very productive way to work And I really admire the dedication of these directors to do that .

Mary Wild 48:41

So I belong to several fandoms . I belong to , i mean , david Lynch , for sure I'm in that fandom and I often will lurk in forums and listen to and like read the comments of what people say , how they interpret that cinema . You know their theories about what's going on , especially in Lynch . Sometimes it's very abstract , so of course it invites a number of different interpretations , a multitude of perceptions of it , which is great . But similarly I love Kubrick , lars von Trier , aronofsky , polanski , you know , to name a few .

Mary Wild 49:27

I love the French director , catherine Brea . She's sort of sometimes called the French Lars von Trier . She's very , she's like a real provocateur , like with the capital P , you know , she's wonderful . So I become quite obsessive . I'm very invested in these filmographies And it's not .

Mary Wild 49:53

I mean , i'm interested and I want to know what other viewers have to say . But the difference maybe for me is that I don't necessarily internalize the opinion of others And I do not project a collective like consensus of what the director has to represent online . So sometimes I see that with fandoms it's almost like wearing a uniform all the members of that club are saying the same thing , they have the same avatar . You know they're very . Sometimes it can become cultish and I recognize that , you know , and I can understand the critique of that . So I try very deliberately not to do that and sort of sometimes do the unexpected and just kind of like throw a little , you know , just a little like I don't know , like sometimes like approach it in a way that can be disruptive . I feel like that is healthy because it's keeping the dynamic of that of interest in that director alive , which is also what I try to do , like in the segments for Mike and in what I'm writing now .

C. Derick Varn 51:13

Yeah , to give you a credit , i'm actually often surprised where you take some of your psychoanalytic segments And I say that with admiration because , as a person who's in humanities academia , i have read a lot of psychoanalytic readings And some of them get pretty obvious . So , for example , recently on your Patreon feed you did an analysis of Kronenberg and you picked the movies from the early period that I think that I thought you would pick , but I was not . I was actually kind of surprised what you talked about . So you know you talk about Videodrome . There are the obvious things to talk about and you did not actually talk about them .

Mary Wild 52:03

So , yes , yes , exactly , because I feel like it's I'm glad you're saying that , i'm glad that you you perceive that , because , yeah , i suppose it's to keep the the qualities of the filmography a little bit like almost a creative derangement in the sensation of that filmography , so that , you know , it's almost like trying to make the point that when I'm doing an auteur study , ultimately that is really only ever going to be a reflection of my psyche And the stuff that , like , keeps me up at night , the stuff that makes me feel anxious or derealized or whatever . And , on the other hand , sometimes in fandom culture , it's more about upholding those iconic pillars of the , of the product , of the cultural product , and you're not allowed to deviate away from that , you're not allowed to go on the kind of you know the lesser known like track and say and say , oh , actually , how do I relate to this subjectively , like , what is it about this that provokes some new insight in me And I guess I'm kind of rebelling against that , you know .

C. Derick Varn 53:36

That makes sense , It's . It's interesting to think about . I was thinking about how Lynch , Lynch and Bonn-Trier although it's funny you bring up Catherine Breagh . I am a big Catherine Breagh fan but not many people in America watch her very much , Even when I've done an episode on French cinema , specifically female French cinema , and she didn't come up , Which in retrospect I'm like , Yeah , I should have done something about that . But I've seen I haven't seen all over films , but I've seen romance , anatomy , hell , blue beard in The Last Mistress Oh , yeah , That I have .

Psychoanalytic Themes in Filmmaking

C. Derick Varn 54:22

And , and I think what's interesting is , as you're talking , like , Oh , I do see a relationship to David Lynch that is not obvious that I would not have seen just by you putting them together in a list , Yeah , What are the traits of these directors that you really like working with ?

Mary Wild 54:50

Well , a lot of what they share to me is creating , i suppose , something similar to what dreaming is , so like , producing , whether it's dream sequences or a dream like quality in their film that somehow seems like surreal or just even nightmarish , actually , you know . So there's the dream stuff , for sure , and they're really like they're really taking advantage of the cinematic art form as a device for approximating the dream . And a lot of the stuff they do as well , which again I think they do share And I'm thinking now of particularly in Kubrick , eyes Wide Shut , i would say , more than his other films is the element of a dark representation of Eros , like some sort of like sexual , like deviancy or a pathological approach to sex , which I think is interesting , you know , because that's really where so much of you know , you know , psychosexual , early formative understanding of our psyche is built on . And I think also that there's occasionally there's a nod to like a some sort of spiritual or I don't know , like esoteric or weird mystical element as well , or at least an interest in that . And what else do they share in common , i guess ? I mean I feel like they're very I'm thinking of Kronenberg especially . I mean , his stuff is very obviously psychoanalytic . But that's because in his case , you know , he actually studied psychoanalysis very intentionally .

Mary Wild 56:59

A lot of these directors claim they don't know anything about Freud , or I mean , lynch is on record saying that he's heard of Freud , but someone in like a Q&A asked him about Lecombe . He's like I've never heard of him , you know . So you know , he seems completely just kind of operating purely like instinctually , and it just so happens that the theories are robust enough that they can provide some kind of clarification or way of study or a route into their work . Which is what I love about psychoanalysis is that it doesn't require the artist or the creator to even be aware of this system of thought , and yet they will still operate unconsciously in a way that supports these theories and validates something that's being said here . So I think that across the board , these directors are all very psychoanalytically minded or not minded , but rather their work is amenable to a psychoanalytic study .

Mary Wild 58:09

Actually , i'm also reminded that two other of my favorite directors that I haven't mentioned , but they also happen to be very consciously psychoanalytically grounded , and that is well , let me say actually three of them Hitchcock , louise Bonoiewell and Woody Allen . Those three , i mean , they know psychoanalysis very well , they read it , they intentionally incorporate it in their work . So that's very exciting to see And I really hope that we see future directors that are making that direct engagement , because it keeps the discipline moving forward and it's exciting to see . I mean I'm really hoping that Brandon Cronenberg , for example , is reading a lot of Carl Jung or Freud or whatever , just like his dad .

C. Derick Varn 58:59

Yeah , i'm always a little careful when I bring up Cronenberg and psychoanalysis because I'm like well , there , it's deliberate and intentional . But with someone like David Lynch although I'm never quite sure that I trust David Lynch Like he says to me I don't know that I believe you , Which , as a poet , is my natural instinct . Whenever an artist says what they're doing or who they do and don't know , I'm like , yeah , we're never gonna admit anything . Any artist who tells you what they think is probably fucking with you . Yeah , You're politely right .

C. Derick Varn 59:43

I know that I've had to do like my second publisher asked me to do this like introduction to the themes of my work and the chapbook I did , and I was like it was like I was like I'm not gonna admit anything . I'm not gonna admit anything . And he was like , well , talk about , like your relationship to Marxism . And I'm like there is none in my work , like it's probably there because it's something I think about all the time , but like yeah , so I'm like I don't think artists in general it's hyper intentional . they are , as they can be , about technique and about vibe . I don't know that they're always that way about meaning .

Mary Wild 1:00:27

Okay , that's interesting .

C. Derick Varn 1:00:33

So you know , with someone like I approach David Lynch , the same way I approach Andre Tarkovsky actually , which is like they're using cinema to do the stuff about dreams and do stuff about direct experience of emotion that you really can only do .

Film and Literary Theory Intersection

C. Derick Varn 1:00:58

The only other we tend to think of cinema and literacy in a lot of ways like narrative literacy , and that's one of the other things like up-cycle analysis is that if you use it for cinema somewhat with respect to the things that make cinema cinema , not just narrative You're gonna get to some things like what's the intellectual content of a vibe , which is something that you get with someone like Tarkovsky or someone like David Lynch Where , like I know , there's a thousand readings of Lost Highway and Mohalland Drive And I even have my theory that they're basically the same movie , just gender-alerts , but they're all going back to some weird fever dream about Sunset Boulevard .

C. Derick Varn 1:02:05

But the intellectual content in those movies to me is actually in the emotive and dream content , and so it resists and this is what I like about it , it resists the ability to like over-depend on intellectualized narrative construction And you have to go into like emotive responses , brain states , various levels of consciousness , et cetera , because that's what the director is actually trying to use the cinema for , which is not the way we're always trained to approach . Like I do think , a lot of people are trained to approach cinema as if it is the same thing as a spoken narrative or a radio narrative or something , which I think is which underutilizes the stuff that is unique to film .

Mary Wild 1:02:54

Absolutely . Yeah , that's really underselling the potential of film . I agree , i think Tarkovsky is really trying to tap into that unique power of film And I love the fact that he of course , was making movies but he also wanted to work as a film theorist And I recognize some of the stuff you're saying actually in his book . Is it sculpting in time ?

C. Derick Varn 1:03:27

Yeah , sculpting in time .

Mary Wild 1:03:29

Yes , exactly , and particularly his techniques of those long takes . It's really subjectivizing The experiential reality of the moment and putting the viewer directly in the scene and involving them through the technique of the long take . So , yes , absolutely , and I also , i really like , actually just incidentally , i love the crossover of filmoteur to film theorist Like , i still haven't read Quentin Tarantino's new book Cinema Speculation , but I am dying to read it Because I really like that move into , you know , film directors , prolific directors , moving into kind of like commenting and observing and really like documenting their views on the function and movement of the art form . You know , i think that should be encouraged more broadly . I mean , i know that David Lynch has also written Catching the Big Fish , which I think in a way can be seen as a film theory book too . I think it can be interpreted that way .

Mary Wild 1:04:56

But I would also , you know , you can also make the argument that Lars von Dreher in his Dogma 95 Manifesto is laying out , you know , his film theory , which I'm sure he's now revised since then because that was a long time ago . But yeah , i'm particularly , i have to say I'm particularly interested to know , or I would be curious in the event of Aronofsky writing a film theory book , because his style in particular intrigues me . He constantly returns to the theme of obsession and the Bible and the artist's journey , you know . So I would love to see how he would construct a theory of film around those things .

C. Derick Varn 1:05:49

Aronofsky's an interesting . I feel like Aronofsky's become sort of the David Foster Wallace when I don't mean anything , actually , am I saying that is not actually comparing him content-wise to David Foster Wallace ? It's like he's the auteur theorist , just like David Foster Wallace was the author We all liked in the 90s and early aughts and that everyone pretends to really hate now . So true , because I'm like I was surprised , like when did everyone turn on David Aronofsky ? because it does seem like that's happened recently . It must have been sometime after Black Swan that people were like I guess maybe after Noah we just never forgave him , or something , i don't know .

Mary Wild 1:06:46

Or maybe I feel like mother really divided people and there were so many angry responses or reactions , yeah , Oh , yeah , that's true Mother and the whale and what I find interesting about that .

C. Derick Varn 1:07:01

I'm like I went back and watched his early filmography and I'm like he's fairly consistent , actually Always been weird and kind of problematic and Exactly , i guess my odd one out is Noah . That's the movie that I'm like okay , i don't get it . But I'm like I don't get it . Yeah , the mother was one where it feel like that was critically divided . I guess the whale there are political reasons why people dislike it .

Mary Wild 1:07:37

Yeah , of course .

C. Derick Varn 1:07:38

But , and I'm actually even sympathetic to those political reasons . But I'm also like but is it an interesting movie ?

Mary Wild 1:07:49

Yeah , i mean this is it . I mean , of course there are valid reasons to look at the whale sort of critically and have misgivings about it . I completely understand . I guess , for me , how I like rationalize the whale is really like in the context of Aronofsky's wider preoccupations and his wider filmography , which is always about access . It's always about this kind of condition or mindset of it's jouissance , the painful principle of too much of something , the place of being psychologically where it's overkill , whether that is in pie , the mathematician scholar who just becomes completely debilitated in his obsession with the number pie , whether it's I mean , we're coming for a dream . It's much more like . You can see it much more clearly because it's about drug abuse and drug addiction .

Mary Wild 1:08:55

But then also in the fountain , the doctor who is obsessed with keeping his ill wife alive . She has a terminal illness and he wants to find the cure for her disease And this just takes over his life completely . He's so single-minded , like one track minded about this and unwilling to accept death as a natural part of the life cycle . And it's so on and on , like in Black Swan . It's a ballerina who trains too much . She just I mean , that is literally , i would say , the tagline that's a whole synopsis of Black Swan . She goes to way too many rehearsals , i mean it just like becomes actually a problem , like she's an obsessive , and the wrestler too . He's caught up in the past , he wants to return to his glory days and he's living in the fantasy of being that beloved popular wrestler And he's just obsessively thinking about that And so on and on it goes , and I think the whale falls into that wider preoccupation .

Mary Wild 1:10:01

It's , i think when it's viewed like that , i do understand why Aronofsky would be drawn to a story like that . He's sort of he said somewhere that he wants to make movies that are like writing the Cyclone Roller Coaster on Coney Island , where you kind of you're sort of edged towards a massive drop . But that journey pre like the drop is like taking along and you don't know when it's gonna happen , and it's always the end of his films that just feel so chaotic and like . I mean it's like it's a lunatic's journey , you know Like . But yeah , i would . But I would make the argument that the whale is probably one of his weaker films . I've not seen the play or read the original play it's based on , so I can't judge it on that level , but the film adaptation left me wanting a little bit . I certainly wouldn't say it's like one of my favorite Aronofsky films , far from it , but I just understood . Maybe I just understand the what drives him to tell a story like that , cause he's interested in excess .

C. Derick Varn 1:11:20

Well , I mean , that's when you point that out . it's absolutely in all of his films , And I would actually say the films I think are weaker are the ones where that metaphor is the most literal , or with the obsession is the most obvious Cause I also like .

Psychoanalyzing Twilight and Female Desire

C. Derick Varn 1:11:33

I think .

C. Derick Varn 1:11:34

I mean , i think working for a dream is brilliantly made , but I also like well , but this is , this is what I would expect from a drug movie , except it , like , goes to 13 on a dial of 10 , but , whereas I do find when he brings it out and the wrestler or mother are in these sorts of ways where it is both obvious kind of the obsession , but not where you would necessarily directly link it to obvious things like addiction , where I find them the most interesting .

Mary Wild 1:12:14

Yes , yes .

C. Derick Varn 1:12:21

I'm gonna this will be our last question , and it's one that I think I like to ask someone who deals with both theory and art together . Is there a movie that you've written about or done analysis I don't just mean a horror movie , anything where when you went to your psychoanarch , when you applied your psychoanalytic reading , your own reading surprised you ?

Mary Wild 1:12:53

Hmm , that's a good question . Yes , yes , actually . So when Mike did his season on vampires obviously , like I mentioned before , he gives me first dibs in terms of what I wanna choose to dive into And I looked at the list I mean , he has some great titles on there and I do like vampire movies a lot , and I noticed that Twilight was on there . And obviously in my first stab at the programming I didn't include Twilight because I thought this film is sort of like it's very silly , it is entertaining and I do actually like it , but I'm not sure I would have much to say about it . But then I kept thinking about , like , how insanely popular it was and just how much money it made , not just in the film , like at the box office , but the original books were just like insanely profitable . And I thought , why , like what was it ? What did she tap into , like Stephanie Myers , when she was writing the books ? what was it about this story ? And so I decided , no , fuck it . I'm gonna like watch every single film in that franchise and I need to get to the bottom of it , like I need to put my finger on why . Why did it hit such a nerve ? And it was a bit of a slog watching them all back to back , because as much as I do actually like the films , they're sort of like fluffy and silly . Sitting down to watch them and then really study them was a bit of a chore . But I think I figured it out And when I started to write it it sort of just came out and I realized that the author was ultimately just paying attention to what young women want and like just sort of shining a light on their fantasy space .

Mary Wild 1:15:06

And that is literally the reason . I believe My proposition is that is the single reason why these movies blew up like that because it's so rare to have , like I said earlier in your show , to have a representation of feminine desire , female desire , feminine juicense , female sexuality and that be the sole interest or the driving force of the story . It is still quite rare , and when those moments happen , sometimes very shoddily . I mean I'm thinking now of also like 50 Shades of Grey , like those books are abysmally written and yet they made a fortune , you know . And the films too . The films are lower than garbage . They're so bad , they're awful , and yet they made a ridiculous , eye-watering , obscene profit . And again the reason is just it's more . It's more an indictment of the state of the culture for having such a lack , such a deficit of representation and space held for female sexuality and fantasy that the few ones that come out as poor as they are or silly and frivolous as they are garnered that much attention .

Mary Wild 1:16:27

So Twilight really surprised me in terms of what it evoked in me and my reading of it and what ended up provoking an analysis for me . And then in the end that is also the segment that brought the most attention to me . On Mike's segments , like I got the most feedback . People just universally seeming to like it , even people who hate the movies , like with a passion , wrote to me , dm me and said I hate Twilight , but I found what you said interesting And that no other film or no other segment provoked that type of response . So it really surprised me on several different levels .

C. Derick Varn 1:17:11

I was . I actually , kind of interestingly , had a similar response to this particular segment . This is interesting . I have been trying to understand what was going on there for a long time And I'll give you a story .

C. Derick Varn 1:17:30

I used to teach university in Korea and I taught film and I chose all the films but one and I let my adult Korean students pick a movie and they picked the first Twilight movie and I could not . I went open . I'm like , okay , what English movie , what English language movie would you like to see ? And it was like 70% Twilight And I was like , okay , there's something I don't get because this is Korea . This is not a place where they should have the cultural purpose purchase in the same way . It's not . So I was like there's something fascinating about the intellectual honesty of its portrayal of basically teenage sexuality and its fears that must really be there because it's what people are responding to . And that got .

C. Derick Varn 1:18:29

And when I was actually in Korea is when the 50 Shades of Grey books started coming out And I remember discovering the story that they started this Twilight fan fiction and I was like this and both were awful . I want people to , for the moment , like I'm fascinated by these as like the effects of bad art and what it can get to . Maybe not even bad art , art that's technically rough and what it can get to because it hit a nerve that reverberated through the culture for like a decade , and yet I don't know why , exactly Like it's , Yeah , exactly .

C. Derick Varn 1:19:20

I think it is the portrayal of feminine subjectivity , and it also has a subversive element to it that I don't think the author I don't know what you know about the author's . She's a Mormon isn't she Yeah . I was about to say . Once I moved to Utah and learned more about the culture , i was like , oh , okay . A whole lot of the weirdness of this book makes a lot more sense to me .

Mary Wild 1:19:45

Yes , exactly Because precisely she's sort of like leaning into something that is like forbidden and remaining in that state , like trying to prolong that state of prohibition as long as she can . And it's that resistance and that kind of state of really amplifying and enhancing the condition of desire that then becomes so appealing , because it's so relatable .

C. Derick Varn 1:20:15

Yeah , yeah .

Mary Wild 1:20:17

It .

C. Derick Varn 1:20:21

Somewhat concerns my suspicion that a lot of religious impulses and a lot of BDSM impulses are effectively the same thing .

Mary Wild 1:20:28

But It's so funny .

C. Derick Varn 1:20:34

For a long time But .

Mary Wild 1:20:37

You're onto something .

C. Derick Varn 1:20:40

Because I was also like how did this Mormon half-life aspire a bunch of admittedly really not particularly educated about the culture of BDSM books too ? I'm just confused . But yeah , i think actually that kind of hits on it . And also I think it is interesting the portrayal of , like you know , feminine Jusson's desire , danger , and I also think the unsatisfactoryness of that plays into , because I do find the Danny Models books kind of unsatisfactory even from their own standpoint .

Mary Wild 1:21:25

Yeah , for sure , Definitely definitely .

C. Derick Varn 1:21:29

But that also makes like . For those of us who know about Jusson's , that makes perfect sense that they would be . Yes , of course , so Which accidentally ends up being really honest . But yeah , that I was . When I asked that question . I wondered if she's going to bring up her analysis of Twilight , because I was also Oh , really Yeah because I was thinking about that , because I've listened to the Vampire series recently and I was like huh .

Mary Wild 1:22:02

Yeah , and genuinely it surprised me And it also kind of took me back at how fun it was to ultimately like piece it together in the analysis , The watching process and the kind of studying the films for patterns . It was quite laborious because the films can be very flat for a very long time , But then piecing it together was rather fun . So at least it was kind of There was some pleasure to be found in the end .

C. Derick Varn 1:22:36

Yeah , it's also . Those films are also interesting to me , in which The other defense I'll make of those films is you get to watch two people who end up being pretty great actors . Right , learn how to act Like on air , like .

Mary Wild 1:22:56

Right , it's a documentation of their like acquiring acting skills as they go .

C. Derick Varn 1:23:03

Yeah , it's funny because I'm like Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson are both actually now remarkably good actors . But when I first saw that movie I was like why , what ? where did they find these people Like ? is it Tommy Wiseau movie ? I don't know .

Mary Wild 1:23:19

Oh my God , it's so funny .

C. Derick Varn 1:23:24

Yeah and yeah . I began teaching high school when those movies came out , so I had to suggest myself to them , and then they were popular even amongst adult students later , and I was very confused . But when do you think your book will be out ?

Mary Wild 1:23:48

So my official deadline to submit this manuscript is the end of January , so I'm hoping to meet that deadline . I just completed my third chapter , so all going well . It will be handed in at the end of January , to come out then like that summer of 2024 .

C. Derick Varn 1:24:09

Awesome . That's actually a pretty decent turnaround too . I used to work as a side gig and publishing , so it's something I know quite a bit about . Yeah , so I'm looking forward to it . I would suggest . I think my listeners would like it , and I would also tell people to check out the Projections podcast and the episode you have gone on The Evolution of Horror . If you're into horror movies , i'd say watch , listen to all of The Evolution of Horror .

Mary Wild 1:24:45

Yes .

C. Derick Varn 1:24:49

I tend to be skeptical of horror shows because they tend to be just fandom shows , and while I'm also a fanboy , i don't love fandom shows . I couldn't tell you why , and so I was surprised how addicted I got to that show . It's basically that show and faculty of horror basically the only two horror podcasts I listened to . Yes , and they've both been at it for a while now , in fact , people have been at it for forever .

Mary Wild 1:25:20

Yeah , they're so good .

C. Derick Varn 1:25:23

And so anything else you'd like to plug .

Mary Wild 1:25:28

Well , i'm also producing exclusive shows . You mentioned my Patreon . You can find me on patreoncom slash mary wild , and you can also find me on social media . I'm psychstarpsycstar on Twitter and Instagram .

C. Derick Varn 1:25:46

Nett , I enjoy your Twitter feed And I think Twitter is a hellscape .

Mary Wild 1:25:50

Yeah , oh , thank you . I think that is a huge compliment , because it is a hellscape .

C. Derick Varn 1:25:58

I feel like Twitter is my own psychological torsor process that I go through for no , i rewatched Videodrone last night , actually listening to your discussion on your Patreon , so I would tell people to go to listen to that And I was like man if Kronenberg had done this in the time of Twitter .

Mary Wild 1:26:20

Oh man .

C. Derick Varn 1:26:23

Because this is already predictive of TV turning into the internet , But like I'm just imagining little flashes of memes destroying minds .

Mary Wild 1:26:35

Oh , man , absolutely .

C. Derick Varn 1:26:39

Yeah , it's actually interesting because I was thinking about Videodrone as part of this trilogy . He did And he says crimes of the future . The current one , not the OG one from the early 70s , is like the capstone of that series And I'm like , well , i guess I see that , but it's the one that's the least like . It's the one that's the most literal about the technological biological metaphor but doesn't do anything with the media stuff . That's in the other view .

Mary Wild 1:27:22

Right So .

C. Derick Varn 1:27:24

That's so true .

Mary Wild 1:27:26

Yeah , and for some reason also , it's like Videodrone . To me it almost feels like a mood ring .

Endlessly Fascinating Films

Mary Wild 1:27:32

Every time I rewatch it , i feel like I'm watching a new film . For some reason It gets strangely dynamic in what , like , how it shifts . It's such a strange , it's truly a strange viewing experience And I pick up on different things every time I watch it . So it's , you know , it is , it's like endlessly fascinating .

C. Derick Varn 1:27:57

Yeah , I would agree with you , actually because I was watching it again . I've seen that movie probably 10 times , Yeah , And I did not . I'm like I feel like I know this movie better than I did . I know this movie but it always surprises me And parts of it always sneak up on me . And I know the film , And that's not true for all of Croninbo's work .

Mary Wild 1:28:19

Exactly .

C. Derick Varn 1:28:20

I think it's kind of true for Naked Lunch too . but those are the two films where I'm like Yeah . The ride on those films always changes For sure , for sure . Well put , thank you . I would just to reiterate people should check out the Projections podcast and your Patreon . I really enjoy your Patreon , but Thank you .

C. Derick Varn 1:28:40

If you ask me to categorize what it is , i can't because I'm like There's movie discussion , there's film discussion and there's just getting to know . Mary , there's stuff on Comedians and I realize that you have an even darker sense of humor than me , which is pretty rare . So , yeah , i make Stalin jokes , but , but your choice of comedians is like , wow , okay , i get it . So , yeah , i would suggest that people want to get to know your work and actually , in a very real sense , pair of socially get to know you . Your Patreon is a good place for that .

Mary Wild 1:29:23

Thank you so much . Thank you , and I'm such a huge fan of your work too and really appreciate you inviting me on your show . Thank you , thank you .