Episode 71: A Knight's Tale with Thomas Lecaque, John Wyatt Greenlee, and Anna Waymack

This week the pod welcomes back Thomas Lecaque and John Wyatt Greenlee along with #HATM newcomer Anna Waymack to talk about maybe the best medieval movie ever made: A Knight's Tale. We talk Chaucer, romance, Heath Ledger, the Black Prince, and that fucking soundtrack. Let's go.

About our guests:
Thomas Lecaque is an associate professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. He specializes in the nexus of apocalyptic religion and political violence. He has written for the Washington Post, Religion Dispatches, Foreign Policy and The Bulwark, among others. Follow him on Twitter: @tlecaque.

John Wyatt Greenlee is  a medievalist and a cartographic historian.His academic research is primarily driven by questions of how people perceive and reproduce their spaces:  how movement through the world — both experiential and imagined — becomes codified in visual and written maps. You can find him on twitter at @greenleejw 

Anna Waymack, is a Ph.D. candidate in Cornell's Medieval Studies Program, and was selected as a fellow in Olin Library's Summer Graduate Fellowship for Digital Humanities in 2016. As part of that fellowship, Anna developed digital humanities expertise and produced a public website focused on an aspect of her research, Geoffrey Chaucer and the charge of raptus brought forth by Cecily Chaumpaigne.

Transcript

Jason Herbert (00:01.313)
recording. How are you my medieval friends? Are we medieval?

Anna Waymack (00:06.405)
medieval.

John Wyatt (00:07.146)
Oh yeah, absolutely.

Jason Herbert (00:09.005)
Okay. Thomas is saying no.

John Wyatt (00:10.338)
Well, Thomas is a recovering medievalist, so...

Thomas Lecaque (00:13.085)
recovering medievalists.

Anna Waymack (00:14.253)
I met you at Kalamazoo. That defines you as medieval.

Jason Herbert (00:14.357)
You know what, you're-

Thomas Lecaque (00:17.74)
Ah, yes, and I have both many fond memories of that and also many fuzzy memories of Kalamazoo. Yes.

Jason Herbert (00:18.004)
Oh.

Anna Waymack (00:23.033)
Well, yes.

Jason Herbert (00:23.849)
Oh my gosh, I met you at Kalamazoo should totally be a Hallmark Christmas movie, right?

Thomas Lecaque (00:28.88)
if only people loved medievalists enough.

Anna Waymack (00:28.981)
It's a conference where Saturday night is a dance with your bibliography.

Jason Herbert (00:35.731)
Oh.

Anna Waymack (00:37.024)
Really weird.

Thomas Lecaque (00:37.502)
I've never been to the dance, and I will admit, I need to go back to Kalamazoo at least one time to actually stay for the dance.

Jason Herbert (00:44.909)
There's a dance at a, at a, at a thing.

Thomas Lecaque (00:46.528)
There's a, oh man.

John Wyatt (00:46.646)
Yep. Yeah.

Anna Waymack (00:47.469)
I saw my undergrad, favorite professor, dancing, double-fisting beers, it was surreal.

Jason Herbert (00:52.757)
Wow, that's the first time double fisting has showed up on our podcast. So that's, we have, we haven't even gotten to the book. I guess. Oh, like.

Thomas Lecaque (00:56.896)
first, but not last.

John Wyatt (00:57.322)
You've been doing the wrong kind of movies.

John Wyatt (01:03.49)
See where Aftogood started already.

Jason Herbert (01:09.153)
Hi Anna and welcome to the pod.

Thomas Lecaque (01:10.852)
All of the comments that come to mind are so inappropriate that I couldn't say them. This is fine. Everything's fine.

Jason Herbert (01:15.945)
This is fine. This is fine. It's okay. We're all trained scholars Why don't you guys introduce yourselves in the drink that you're having right now? John why don't we start with you since you're the first person to arrive?

John Wyatt (01:29.838)
Fantastic. My name is John Wyatt Greenlee. This is, I think, the fourth or fifth or tenth time I've been on this podcast. I am a medievalist by training. I work with maps and cartographic history. I am also the world's premier number one eel historian. And yeah, so right now I'm drinking bourbon, drinking larceny, and I am thrilled to be here. Me and my drinker thrilled to be here.

Jason Herbert (01:53.865)
Wait, wait, where does that bourbon come from, John Wyatt?

John Wyatt (01:57.942)
Oh, probably anywhere but Kentucky. Kentucky's terrible.

Jason Herbert (02:01.586)
Are you doing that shit? When I got here to Colorado, people were like, we make bourbon here too. I'm like, you don't kiss your cousins here. Y'all don't make bourbon. So...

John Wyatt (02:04.422)
I'm sorry.

John Wyatt (02:09.246)
No, no, this is from Kentucky. I have a bourbon upstairs that's from Utah, but it's not as good.

Jason Herbert (02:13.137)
Okay, thank God.

Anna Waymack (02:18.369)
You have a little bit of bourbon from me, that's terrible.

John Wyatt (02:21.022)
Oh my god, yeah, no, that's, that's wow. Yeah. No.

Anna Waymack (02:24.461)
I wonder if we can hand on a bottle of Prohibition Bourbon. It's terrible.

John Wyatt (02:27.49)
Yeah. It is.

Thomas Lecaque (02:30.12)
sounds special in a number of ways.

John Wyatt (02:32.202)
Alright, so that's me. I do maps and eels and drink bourbon.

Jason Herbert (02:37.013)
I don't even know how we put that on the CV, but let's do it. Thomas, introduce yourself, sir.

Thomas Lecaque (02:41.764)
I'm Tom Slacock, also been here a couple of times. I'm an associate professor of history at Grandview University in Des Moines, Iowa. I'm still on campus, so I'm drinking water. But when I get home, there will be Akintoshin and it will be glorious. I am trained as a medievalist. I'm an early Americanist now. I'm an early Americanist now, and it feels pretty delightful. I like it here.

John Wyatt (02:59.054)
Good choice.

Jason Herbert (03:02.733)
We're covering.

Jason Herbert (03:08.289)
I still feel like Americanists, like we talk about medieval, I guess we can get into this stuff, but don't we have a medieval period in the North America? I don't know how this works.

Thomas Lecaque (03:17.712)
I mean, so do you really want to go down that rabbit hole, Jason? Because we could go down that.

Anna Waymack (03:20.996)
Yeah

Jason Herbert (03:21.729)
Not before we introduce Anna because Anna's here for the first time and I'm like, we're not we're not we're not going to get sidetracked yet. We can't.

Anna Waymack (03:28.497)
But I've seen Thomas Klock on Twitter about medieval America.

John Wyatt (03:32.808)
Uh-huh.

Jason Herbert (03:33.185)
Oh, it's beautiful. You know what, Anna? Oh, you oh, that was very nice. I just saw

Thomas Lecaque (03:37.652)
My god, cocktails come from the heavens when she speaks.

Anna Waymack (03:40.273)
The cocktails are delivered from the heavens.

John Wyatt (03:42.862)
Thank you.

Jason Herbert (03:42.913)
I got this is this is going to be either the greatest or worst pod we've ever done. All right, everyone hold up your watery libation while we're doing this here. I'm taking a picture. All right, there we go. Anna, introduce yourself. It's your first time on the pod.

Anna Waymack (03:44.301)
One more piece of skulltail.

Thomas Lecaque (03:49.16)
No, greatest, greatest of all time.

John Wyatt (03:51.576)
Oh, Chris.

Anna Waymack (04:03.278)
I am also a trained medievalist working on a dissertation about Chaucer, among others, Chaucer and his buddies, let's go with that, and how they deal with the concept of old age. I used to run a website on what we had good reason to believe was a rape charge brought against Chaucer. And now...

Very recently, very excitingly, we found new documents and it looks most likely it was actually a labor issue. Complicated, but fun. We still find new documents. Oh, oh, it was withrush. You have never seen document discoveries so hyped.

Jason Herbert (04:35.594)
Oh, okay. It's like this shit got dark fast.

John Wyatt (04:41.07)
I'm sorry.

John Wyatt (04:50.068)
Mm.

Anna Waymack (04:51.373)
Understandably.

Jason Herbert (04:53.249)
known.

Jason Herbert (04:56.789)
Well, what has been hyped, my friends, is this pod. We have been working on this pod. This pod has come up, and I think every single pod, Thomas and JW have been on the pod. We've been building to this, this single one forever. And it's time, it's time for us to talk about, shall we rock the audience? Is it time to get going? Are we talking about a nice tale? All right.

John Wyatt (05:16.723)
Oh yeah.

John Wyatt (05:23.714)
Yeah.

Jason Herbert (05:24.785)
Let's start. Let's just, let's just dive in. Yes. Good. We can, if we, I'm told by our intrepid producer Fletcher that if we talk about some of the music in depth, like golden years and we will rock you, then we can actually layer that into the pod. So at the Bay has to not getting sued if we can bring those, those things up and talk about why they matter. In fact, we have to talk about the music. It's, it's maybe the single most contentious aspect of this film.

Anna Waymack (05:26.307)
Yeah. Do you have Queen in the background?

John Wyatt (05:44.11)
Wait.

Thomas Lecaque (05:48.128)
Yeah.

Jason Herbert (05:53.917)
And that's why it turned in me that in labyrinth turned me into a David Bowie fan, but we'll get Why golden years and why not magic dance? Oh

Thomas Lecaque (06:01.164)
Jason, the next thing we're gonna do is labyrinth. You know that, right? Now that you've said the words, we're gonna do a labyrinth.

Jason Herbert (06:07.837)
Is Lepereth medieval? Yeah, it is, isn't it?

John Wyatt (06:11.534)
It is... it could be? Yeah.

Thomas Lecaque (06:12.412)
Labyrinth can be whatever you want it to be. Labyrinth is glorious.

Jason Herbert (06:16.15)
I used to play Magic Dance.

Anna Waymack (06:17.827)
It's more like folktales.

Jason Herbert (06:21.661)
I'm in. I don't care. I love it. Like I love all things Labyrinth. I grew up with it. Jennifer Connelly, I'm gonna need a minute. It's just, it's a perfect film. Just like a Knight's Tale. All right, let's just jump in this. Okay, first question. Is a Knight's Tale the best movie ever made in the history of mankind? Go. What?

Anna Waymack (06:40.889)
No, I'm sorry, but no, it's very close, but have you not seen the Princess Bride?

John Wyatt (06:50.101)
Uggghhh...

Jason Herbert (06:51.437)
Hot take, hot take.

Thomas Lecaque (06:51.564)
Okay, it is not, I can't say it's the best movie ever made in the history of time. It is, in my opinion, the best movie ever made about the Middle Ages, with Lion and Winter being the other one it's in contention with.

Jason Herbert (07:06.481)
You were, is that Richard Harris?

Thomas Lecaque (07:09.052)
Yeah, now is it my favorite? God no. Night's Tale, favorite medieval movie, second 13th warrior, third Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. But like best, I think this is also best movie. Night's Tale is the best movie made about the middle ages, in addition to my favorite.

Jason Herbert (07:17.313)
Prince of Thieves.

Jason Herbert (07:26.185)
All right. Chad W?

John Wyatt (07:27.498)
Yeah, and that's pretty much where I would land too. I don't know that it's necessarily the best movie of all time ever, although it could be. But yeah, it is by far the best sort of medieval film out there.

Jason Herbert (07:41.845)
Yeah, and that's kind of amazing. Like there's so much about this film that is completely anachronistic. It joyfully plays with the history. It joyfully plays with all of these somewhat real characters like Chaucer. It's based on some other dudes. It's based on some stuff and it's. It's it's.

John Wyatt (08:00.15)
Yeah, and it's an interesting movie in that it really pisses off a lot of people who want it, like who get hung up on the anachronistic qualities of it. And they're like, but it's not medieval. And it is most medievalist's favorite medieval movie by a mile. Like there's not a whole lot of debate about that. It just is. Cause it captures the spirit of it. And like even the sort of anachronistic qualities of it are point to some of the like the...

Jason Herbert (08:05.502)
so much.

John Wyatt (08:28.722)
unintentional anachronisms in movies that try to be really much more sort of nitty gritty and detail oriented, which is great. I really love that.

Anna Waymack (08:37.081)
you'll bear with me for a brief tangent on the Anachronisms. So I've been doing some stuff on the side teaching high schoolers and middle schoolers Latin and whatnot. And they look online for translations and they find these things that were translated in the late 1800s. And it makes the poetry utterly alien to them. Or even a look in like the Norton Anthology and

modernization of Gawain and the Green Knight, and yet Norton has to put a gloss on the side for some of the words because they're a little archaic. And we do that to try to convey the sense that like this is old. You know, those Victorian translations are using language older than Victorian English to drive that home. But when these people are writing, they're not always trying to be formal. Not everything from the past is stiff and serious.

and it would work much better if we actually translated things into our current language. And so that's what A Knight's Tale does fabulously with the music and the costuming and turning it into, well, a sports movie that one character wears like high fashion that's really clearly not everyone's taste and frivolous.

um, that we bring in David Bowie. That dance scene is one of the best scenes ever, because it makes you understand that medieval parties were, in fact, parties. They had fun.

Jason Herbert (10:22.677)
Yeah.

John Wyatt (10:24.166)
You can't have fun in the medieval period. It's all dark and terrible. And there's plague. Yes, yeah, color is important.

Anna Waymack (10:27.645)
Also, the movie has a color.

Thomas Lecaque (10:29.892)
This is the last pre-911... Well, and part of it, this is the last pre-911 medieval movie. This comes out, what, summer 2001? Right before we decided that everything needed to have a muted color palette and every peasant had to be literally encrusted with shit on screen.

Anna Waymack (10:38.401)
No.

Jason Herbert (10:47.549)
Yeah. Well, I mean, that's been a thing that we've seen over and over again. It's like everything that color palette that washed out blue thing, the dromine nuts about the Norseman, right? That Robert Eggers film. It's just so goddamn hard to watch because the colors are shit. Why does it have to, why does it have to look that way? It's like we were predisposed to this idea that the middle ages were blue gray. And that's what we've got.

Thomas Lecaque (10:47.86)
Yeah.

Anna Waymack (11:14.503)
or covered in mud.

Thomas Lecaque (11:14.636)
Yep. Both. Both end. Yes, covered in blue-gray mud or, you know.

Jason Herbert (11:16.726)
Yeah.

John Wyatt (11:22.206)
No, I will say that, like, Nightsdale doesn't entirely depart from that either, right? Like, there's not a middle class in this movie. There are rich people and there are poor people. And the poor people are poor, you can tell, A, by the clothes, and B, by the fact that they are always sort of dirt stained. Like, it is a marker that the movie is using to tell you class and station. But that's a really different thing than, like...

Anna Waymack (11:44.025)
Hey, some of the knights get covered in mud too when they face plants.

John Wyatt (11:48.231)
That is true. But they clean up. They clean up later.

Jason Herbert (11:49.157)
to do, right?

Anna Waymack (11:51.213)
Yeah.

Thomas Lecaque (11:52.476)
And the setting that they live in is not drab, right? Their clothing may be drab as a marker of the economics of the color, but they do not live in a world that is devoid of color and music and life and joy and basic human things. I think Brian Helgeland's comment on the music was like, he figured the 70s were always the 70s. So 1370s, 1970s, let's go for it. I mean, like, I love the fact that he's just owning that the point is you want this to feel normal. You don't have full string orchestras until

John Wyatt (11:56.321)
Mm-mm.

Anna Waymack (11:56.414)
Mm-hmm.

Thomas Lecaque (12:20.436)
the early modern period, you're making anachronisms there too. We censor stuff weirdly. I'm sure you guys, like, you've read, like, William IX's Troubadour poems, right? Right. Jason, this is not for you, Jason, sorry. This is not for you. I'm like, yeah.

Jason Herbert (12:33.705)
must be a question for John W.

Not so much. I write about cows in Florida. I'm like, I find it to be very moving. So yes, go ahead.

Anna Waymack (12:46.451)
Well...

Thomas Lecaque (12:47.3)
Medieval love poetry is sometimes deeply romantic, but the guy who is credited as being the first troubadour has entire poems about fucking his vassal's wives. Very explicitly, right? It would be, you'd be playing Petey Pablo. Well, that'd be Catullus. Catullus would be Petey Pablo frequently in the background. But yeah. But I love just making it feel alive, right? That's...

Anna Waymack (13:05.891)
Yeah.

Anna Waymack (13:12.269)
Well, could tell us unless he's translated by the Victorians.

John Wyatt (13:15.202)
What? Short. Right.

Thomas Lecaque (13:15.669)
Yes, in which case it is a you just have giant redacted for Catella 16

Jason Herbert (13:22.157)
All right, let me ask you this.

Thomas Lecaque (13:22.996)
Jason, if you ever want to read some filthy Roman poetry, just as a gift to yourself, Catullus 16, the title has been called, I think it's been called what? The filthiest expression ever written in Latin?

Anna Waymack (13:25.43)
Oh my god.

Jason Herbert (13:34.333)
You know, it's funny, I was actually on filt earlier today. So, uh, it was, it was, it was fire. It's about to, we're talking about an NEH grant application being filed tomorrow.

Thomas Lecaque (13:41.968)
I'm sure that exists. I'm happy for you.

John Wyatt (13:44.128)
And she probably does.

Anna Waymack (13:51.665)
So can I ask, Jason, in the questions you sent us, you mentioned having to rig a chaucer in high school. And the way you mentioned this suggested that it was not an enthralling experience. Because you asked me what I was fond of in this movie.

Jason Herbert (13:53.676)
Yes.

Yes.

John Wyatt (14:06.306)
Bit of a chore, was it?

Jason Herbert (14:06.453)
No.

I wanna, and I'm so happy you're here because I, I want-

Anna Waymack (14:11.701)
What lesson did you have to read?

Jason Herbert (14:15.021)
I remember like high school was first of all, like 30 something years ago for me.

Anna Waymack (14:17.742)
Okay. We can...

John Wyatt (14:20.514)
He's my age, Anna.

Jason Herbert (14:22.881)
What the fuck's happening, John?

Anna Waymack (14:23.519)
Oh, it's so silly.

John Wyatt (14:28.035)
Hehe

Anna Waymack (14:29.753)
What?

Jason Herbert (14:29.769)
So I'm 46. So I was, I would have been rating Chaucer in sophomore, junior year, high school, right in Kentucky, which, you know, if for people who are not familiar, the interesting thing about being a historian is actually going to Kentucky is actually like going back in time anyway. So, you know, I had, I had the, the two things going on. I hated it, but again, I was a really poor high school student and the resources we had at Calabay County high school.

not the best. And I'm almost convinced, Anna, that probably what we had going on in the 1990s were really poor translations of this material. It's almost like reading the King James Version of the work, you know?

Anna Waymack (15:05.997)
I'm a dressmaker, officer.

it but the other half is that Chaucer writes in all sorts of genres. And so there's some stuff of his that's like sermons that I would frankly rather do my taxes and yours instead of reading it again. And I like Chaucer but I think I can safely say you didn't read the Miller's Tale.

Jason Herbert (15:14.422)
Mm-hmm.

Thomas Lecaque (15:26.582)
Thank you.

Jason Herbert (15:31.861)
I think that I did. I don't know.

Anna Waymack (15:32.046)
Big O.

Thomas Lecaque (15:33.484)
No, I can't imagine you read the Miller's Tale in high school. Jason, you did not read the Miller's Tale in high school.

John Wyatt (15:35.889)
You would remember it, I think.

Anna Waymack (15:39.888)
Are we allowed to swear on this? We're allowed to swear on this, yes?

Jason Herbert (15:39.981)
I have no idea what... I literally just asked John what the F like when he said we're the same age. No, you can... Kid me? Absolutely you can swear. Swear... By all means... If you're a prude, this is not your podcast.

Thomas Lecaque (15:41.716)
Yes, yes.

Anna Waymack (15:56.909)
Um, in the Miller's Tale, there is a fuckboy with a guitar. He won't stop playing the guitar outside the window of the woman he's got a crush on, and also her husband's window. Um, there is a series of shenanigans in which someone kisses someone else's unclear whether it's... Well, look, I got in trouble at one point for translating...

Jason Herbert (16:01.517)
Okay.

Jason Herbert (16:21.866)
You can say the word.

Anna Waymack (16:26.249)
a word I would say accurately to cunt for high schoolers, or butthole.

Jason Herbert (16:30.303)
Oh.

Anna Waymack (16:40.153)
And then he comes back and makes out with someone else's rear end. They fart and he rams a hot poker up there.

John Wyatt (16:49.893)
you'd remember.

Anna Waymack (16:49.925)
This is not a delicate story. He is, however, kind of hilarious. Charleston writes pretty much every genre there is at the time, so he's got some poems that are just petty little things. And I do mean petty, like, hey, my scribe, why do you keep screwing up what I'm dictating to you? You suck.

Jason Herbert (16:53.549)
I kind of feel like that got left on the editing room floor of this film.

Jason Herbert (17:07.702)
Mm-hmm.

Anna Waymack (17:17.901)
He's got stuff like, I'm in love with her and she won't even look my way. I'm going to die of love. He's got these epics. He's got things that read to me with a bit of a horror vibe. Um, things that are more like modern fairy tales. Everything. And, and also, yeah, the dirty stuff.

John Wyatt (17:39.15)
And I think part of, to your point, Anna, a minute ago about like Jason's early experience, and I think a lot of people's early experience with Trosser and Shakespeare and a lot of other things is they get sort of written in as sort of canonical pieces of early English literature and so they are approached, what, sort of slightly religiously, right?

Anna Waymack (17:58.797)
Yeah, the middle term of the capital L.

John Wyatt (18:01.482)
Yes, exactly. And that's how they get presented. And of course, among that does a couple of things if you give a high school student that. And one of them is it's going to turn them off on it. This is how you teach middle school students and high school students that Shakespeare is boring and Chaucer is boring. Is you treat it like, you know, you treat it like.

Jason Herbert (18:18.291)
Right.

John Wyatt (18:24.526)
scripture.

Anna Waymack (18:25.585)
Plus, yeah, if you don't translate it, if you tell them it's English and they'll be fine, you're probably correct and you should feel bad.

John Wyatt (18:30.321)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep.

Jason Herbert (18:34.313)
Well, actually, OK, so while we're on Chaucer, we'll come back to setting the stage a little bit later, but we're on Chaucer now. I want to talk about it. And can we talk about Paul Bettany as Chaucer first? Like, what are your thoughts on Paul Bettany's Chaucer? This is this is a verse. When I started watching this movie the very first time, I didn't even put together that it was Chaucer. Right. It's like it's just some random what like because I was so far removed. I didn't understand. This is Jeffrey fucking Chaucer. Right. So.

Just in case those of you still listening.

Anna Waymack (19:06.105)
the father of English literature. That's not Shakespeare, that's Paulson.

Jason Herbert (19:08.329)
Yes, you know.

Jason Herbert (19:13.429)
What are your thoughts on Paul Bettany's Chaucer? Do you like this version of Chaucer on film? And do we see other versions of Chaucer anywhere else?

Anna Waymack (19:19.345)
Thank you.

Anna Waymack (19:22.609)
I cannot think of a single other version on film. We do have some, we have a sort of manuscript portrait of him done by someone who probably knew him. There are a series of books written by a medievalist. Oh my gosh, I'm blanking on who. Murder mysteries, I think, that have Trosser as a side character. Bruce Halsinger, oh, Bruce Halsinger?

Jason Herbert (19:25.602)
Really?

John Wyatt (19:51.319)
Oh, yeah, yeah.

Thomas Lecaque (19:51.759)
No! Okay. Yeah.

Anna Waymack (19:53.129)
Yes. Um... But I can't think of him on film, although I'm not a huge film buff. I feel like I-

John Wyatt (20:01.633)
I can't either. Maybe everybody looked at Betany's character and was like, I can't beat that. We're done.

Anna Waymack (20:07.697)
But that's fun. We're good.

Jason Herbert (20:09.377)
He's nude. When does Chaucer live? When is his time? Is he along in, is this film set with Tom Ute's at 1370s? Am I right?

Anna Waymack (20:16.947)
So, if you open it up, this... No, it apparently is stenciled before it came in 72, although it's got a few things that don't always line up.

Thomas Lecaque (20:18.964)
This film is set during, are you sure?

John Wyatt (20:19.6)
Earlier than that. Yes.

John Wyatt (20:26.578)
Right, so the Battle of Poitiers is 1356. Which it like the time, so you're basically talking mid 14th century, like the timelines, the specific timelines for the movies don't line up because Chaucer is born in 1340 or so, so like at the time of Poitiers he's like 16 or something.

Anna Waymack (20:31.39)
Mm hmm.

Anna Waymack (20:45.086)
It does line up. So in the 1370s he was traveling a lot in Europe, sort of on errands for the king.

John Wyatt (20:56.106)
Right, but what I'm saying is like, so Rufus Sewell's character gets taken away from the tournaments. He's gone for a while because he has to go fight and there's that scene at Poitiers where he's looking at the tournament results. So like that puts a real firm timeline marker if you care about it in 1356. So like he's...

Anna Waymack (21:06.919)
Right.

Jason Herbert (21:10.55)
Mm-hmm.

Thomas Lecaque (21:16.96)
Fair enough.

Anna Waymack (21:18.705)
I thought I was looking at some interview they said 1372 because I was trying to figure out what.

John Wyatt (21:23.682)
Well, that's when what the book of the Duchess gets written in 1370 or so. Anyway, I think you've got sort of mid 14th century and you've got kind of a lot of things that are happening all about that same time that the film is sort of squishing together and not really caring about the timeline, which makes sense with the movie. So, but yeah, somewhere between 1350 and 1370, somewhere in that range.

Anna Waymack (21:28.271)
Get to the video later.

Anna Waymack (21:42.725)
Yeah.

Jason Herbert (21:49.953)
See that actually, as an outsider for someone who doesn't know medieval history, that actually tells me this film is even more historically accurate than I thought, because I had always thought that they were just kind of taking some just assumptions, like this is a generic country, these are some generic battles, this battle of Poitiers.

Anna Waymack (22:03.237)
Woohoo!

It's a different world. From the French night.

John Wyatt (22:07.958)
No, there's actually quite a lot of very real history undergirding this movie and making it work. Like...

Thomas Lecaque (22:10.154)
Yeah.

Thomas Lecaque (22:14.224)
Yes.

Jason Herbert (22:14.281)
All right, well, go for that, guys. Let's jump in on like the real history of this film about what we can actually see, things that actually took place. And then we'll jump into some of the stuff about the music and the glows and Shannon Sauciman and Heath Ledger. We're gonna do this whole thing on Heath Ledger's brilliance. But let's talk about the actual history that we actually see on film. What are we actually seeing here? John, you're talking about this stuff undergirding, which is by the way, a really fancy word. What are we seeing on screen here?

Anna Waymack (22:15.333)
This is it.

Jason Herbert (22:43.888)
Aside from Anniscat.

Anna Waymack (22:46.229)
The focus crunch, which puts this before 1376, though, as is pointed out, uses the same language.

Jason Herbert (22:50.645)
But Jesus is English.

John Wyatt (22:50.674)
Mm-hmm, yes. Yes.

Jason Herbert (22:54.665)
One of the great lines in the film.

Thomas Lecaque (22:57.696)
something like that.

John Wyatt (22:57.742)
That's until he becomes American later on.

Thomas Lecaque (23:03.792)
Ulrich von Lichtenstein is a real identity. He's a 13th century, he's a 13th century minisinger. So he's a German troubadour, effectively. Everyone should just be a troubadour because Southern France is the greatest. He's a, what, mid-13s, 1220s, 1230s, is that his high point? He writes a book, it's like, what, service to a lady or something like that, that is all about how you properly act as a knight with your courtly love shit.

Anna Waymack (23:05.685)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Herbert (23:06.397)
Oh is he? Oh!

John Wyatt (23:21.122)
Think that's right?

Anna Waymack (23:22.033)
Sounds right.

Thomas Lecaque (23:33.968)
Which is great, like it's great having Heath Ledger appropriate Heath Ledger's character adopting this identity I think that's cute. Gelderland is what a real place but different

Anna Waymack (23:41.005)
I mean, we've seen a lot of him inventing chivalry and courtly love for a common concern. Sometimes, I think.

Thomas Lecaque (23:47.136)
Do we give him credit for that? Yeah. Okay.

John Wyatt (23:51.29)
I mean, he's certainly writing right in that time period. And we should probably come back to the question of sort of chivalry and courtly love, because it's important in a whole bunch of ways. So the movie is set in sort of in the middle of the Hundred Years War, essentially right at like the sort of the apogee of England's success in the war, at the point where England is sort of.

Thomas Lecaque (23:54.431)
Yeah.

Anna Waymack (23:59.957)
Oh yeah.

John Wyatt (24:18.238)
it's absolute most successful. So the Battle of Poitiers, which happens in the middle of film, is a crashing defeat for the French, where the French king gets captured and taken back to England and held essentially ransom in London for several years until it signs a treaty that basically gives the English all of France. So like you're right at the, at the moment where, where like, it doesn't get any better. It never, the 200 years war never gets any better for the English than it is right now.

And sort of the hero, the English hero of this moment is, is the Black Prince, Prince Edward, who we see several times in the film. And to the lesser extent, his father, Edward III. But the Black Prince is, Black Prince wins several major battles, including Poitiers and is, and then winds up dying of dysentery about 10 years after this film. So we never actually like,

He gets to live on in English folklore and history as a paragon of virtue without having to actually rule and stuff. So, yeah, so you've got the Hundred Years' Wars going on. You have a lot of contestation between the French and... We tend to think of it as a war between France and England, but it's really a war between the French king and the English king. And it's really complicated and convoluted about who's on what sides because they all have many of the...

Anna Waymack (25:20.857)
It wouldn't

John Wyatt (25:43.758)
the lords in France and England have allegiances to both kings and they're having to choose. And you get a sense of sort of what we might think of as early nationalists and that comes out of this, but it's a real mistake to think about it in like real nationalist terms. But so the first part of this movie set in France, which is sort of the seat of chivalry and these tournaments, there are in fact a lot of these tournaments. There is a tournament season that...

like thousands of knights from all around Europe come to France by the time you get to the 14th century where we are here, it's a real thing. Like there are people that come for a season, thousands of them, and they have these tournaments. And the tournaments are initially bigger sort of melee fights and the jousting that we see is sort of an aside, but by the time you get to the period of this film, jousting is actually the primary thing that you see at tournaments. So that's kind of real. A lot of the sort of pageantry and the procession we see in the film is real as well.

There is not a world championship of jousting, as fun as that would have been. But yes, there were cash prizes and there were smaller local tournaments and big tournaments. And they tended, nobles and kings had held tournaments and jousts to celebrate anniversaries.

Anna Waymack (26:51.025)
were there cash prizes?

John Wyatt (27:10.478)
crownings and all kinds of things. So it was a real thing. And it starts, the tournaments, they start as sort of an attempt, especially in France, I think, to sort of rein in some of the violence, the sort of random violence, acts of violence you get going on with the knights and things. And then by the time you get to this period, it is much more stylized, which we kind of see, right? I think the rules about like, you know,

one point for a hit here and two points for a hit there. That's made up, but like, there's a lot of what we see about Jocelyn in the film that's historically accurate. Other things that matter, the Rufus Sewell's character, which is great, I love this character in this movie, but he's one of the, he gets, he introduces himself as the leader of the free companies, which is a thing in the Hundred Years' War. There's not one free company, there's a whole bunch of them. Basically, it's bands of mercenaries that get hired by the French king and the English king

Jason Herbert (27:54.731)
Yeah.

John Wyatt (28:08.782)
to sort of fight in the Hundred Years War. And they, in periods of peace, which you have in the middle of this movie, they become a real problem, especially in Southern France. So these are all things that like, there's a lot of actual history sort of undergirding the plot of this movie and in a lot of ways moving it forward. So it is, for as much sort of fun as it has with the history, it is also a very serious sort of,

It's floating on a very serious lake of history.

Jason Herbert (28:42.601)
I want to ask you guys, you know, a very major part of this film is the idea of a man changing his stars, right? This idea of a person going from peasantry all the way into nobility. For those unfamiliar with this era and the class system of the age, is that possible? Can people go from peasantry? Talk to us. You guys like, no.

John Wyatt (28:56.622)
Uhhh

Anna Waymack (29:01.513)
So...

So historians are shaking their heads. I can see that, but I want to make a few points about Chaucer himself. He's from a merchant's family. His father was a vinter. Pretty much the relatives that we know before that were vinters. They were pretty well off merchants, but they were merchants. He winds up marrying a lady-in-waiting to the queen.

Thomas Lecaque (29:04.718)
No.

Jason Herbert (29:12.75)
Oh, go do tell. Okay.

Anna Waymack (29:33.477)
Her sister winds up marrying John of Gaunt, one of the princes, a brother of the Black Prince. Chaucer winds up in the king's household eventually after he's first served in the household of a daughter-in-law of the king and then two of his sons. Chaucer's son, Chaucer actually winds up a member of parliament for a bit. His son is chief butler to four kings.

He's speaker of the House of Commons. And if we go just a few more generations down, his son has a daughter, Alice. Alice's grandson is Richard III's heir before Richard III gets his butt kicked and then gets buried under what's now a parking lot. So like, Closser's granddaughter's grandson doesn't wind up on the throne, but that's because a battle went the wrong way.

Thomas Lecaque (30:33.355)
There is social mobility.

And it's not, I mean, Chastra's a great example of it. You see this in France as well, where the building of a bureaucratic state, you start bringing people from outside of traditional noble families to help run the bureaucracy so that they have to owe allegiance to the king instead of other loyalties. They're like, Anna, you're, again, yes, 100% correct in every possible way. You don't become a knight, though. Not in your own lifetime. You do not rise from peasant to knight.

Generationally, yes, and on levels of wealth and influence and power, you can make meteor climbs. I think I'm trying to remember if I'm correct on this. I think Helgeland had the idea while reading a biography of William Marshall, who is already a knight and goes from being a relatively poor knight because of, I mean, the end of the anarchy, to being like William the Marshall.

So like the meteoric rise on that point, but it's the two, squishing the two things together. What if a peasant becomes the knight isn't going to happen, but a poor knight can become super important and a poor person who is clever and has the right connections can now become very important in their own life, but like pass on better fortunes to their children.

Anna Waymack (31:35.534)
Yeah.

John Wyatt (31:46.958)
So I'd add to that, like at the sort of bottom end of nobility and knighthood, it's not like a firm line. There are people that sort of fall out of being knights and fall back into sort of lower classes into sort of what we might think of as middle class or even peasantry, right? Because one of the things you see in this film, right, is like if you're jousting somebody and you beat them, you get to take their horse and their armor and that shit's expensive. Like if you beat a...

poor ass knight and you take his stuff, he's probably not going to be able to like re purchase it, which means he's sort of out of the game. And so there is there, there are places where people in what we would think of as the night or sort of fall out and where, where people sort of at the upper ends of what we might think of as the middle class sort of move up, there is mobility. And I think we talked about this when we did kingdom of heaven, right? This idea that like it is conceivable for a blacksmith to have gone from being a blacksmith to a knight. Or for.

or a knight from being a knight to being an advisor to the king of Jerusalem. But to go from blacksmith to advisor to the king of Jerusalem is like a step way too far. So like there is mobility and, and sometimes in, as Anna said, over the course of generations, there's can be sort of extreme mobility. Uh, but like in one lifetime, it tends to be a little more, um, uh, confined than that. It is also the case that if you impersonate.

a knight or a king, this happens sometimes too, and you get caught, you're kind of screwed. Nobody's going to be like, that was funny. Cool. We're just going to live with that. Is it Edward I who has an impersonator? There's several English kings who have an impersonator. I think there's Edward I maybe who has an impersonator who he brings to the castle to talk to, brings to London to talk to him because he thinks he's really hilarious. Then the guy starts yelling at him for sitting on his throne and Edward's like, nope.

Um, and hangs him and his cat, I think is, cause it, cause yeah, because apparently the guy under torture confesses that the cat made him do it.

Jason Herbert (33:49.822)
Mmm.

Jason Herbert (33:57.389)
Damn.

John Wyatt (33:58.434)
So I think it's Edward I, but I might be wrong. It's one of the Edwards who has this. Yeah, so there are people who impersonate kings and lords, and you can get away with this, actually, in places where nobody has seen the king for a while, because you just have to dress like him. There's medieval sumptuary laws that limit what different classes can wear. So if you want people to think you're noble, you just have to dress the...

essentially and be in a place where nobody knows who the other who the noble actually is. It's like that part's actually like reasonable that he could have pretended to have been a noble dressed in nightly clothes and pass it off and then gotten in trouble for it.

Jason Herbert (34:41.321)
I want to ask you guys about love. A major part of this film is obviously the love story between Heath Ledger and Shannon Sossman's Jocelyn. And I have two questions. One, did nobles ever marry out of romantic love? And then two, was it possible to marry or to love beyond classes? I know that was a big thing. You know, in early in the 80s, the idea of Prince Charles and Lady Diana.

was that you were these class, these cross-class kind of things. So what about, and that seems to be a thing here too. Like Heath Ledger is pretending to be a nobleman, but he's not and everyone knows he's not. And yet she accepts him even once she finds, and we'll get into the quotes that Thomas is like dying to talk about here in a bit. Talk to me about love. How do feelings work in the middle ages?

Anna Waymack (35:41.977)
How much do you trust what they write?

Jason Herbert (35:41.995)
WAITING!

Jason Herbert (35:45.713)
Ooh, are we going to complicate the archive?

Anna Waymack (35:48.589)
Look, you got me in because I'm a Torsarian, and the number one thing about Torsarian is we don't trust a thing he says.

Jason Herbert (35:55.581)
I brought you in because Thomas and John said you were fucking cool. So yeah. Alright, go on.

Thomas Lecaque (35:59.52)
We were right.

Anna Waymack (36:03.228)
So I can tell you about what the literature says about love, their literature, but that doesn't mean that that's what they actually did or felt. So in a lot of the literature that's about courtly love, as we call it now, marriage isn't really simpatico with being in love and

Jason Herbert (36:08.109)
Go for it.

Anna Waymack (36:28.149)
I was trying to find it before this and I couldn't, but I know that there was one tale that ends with, and then they lived happily ever after, as if they weren't married.

Thomas Lecaque (36:38.87)
Ha ha ha!

Anna Waymack (36:41.041)
We're a lot of people. So marriage is an impediment to love. There's guides to love. One of them, I think it's Capilano says, well, if someone's left a widow, can she, if she's in love with like one of her servants, bury him? No. Nope, can't marry below like that, but he can be her lover, just not her husband.

So this is all sort of suggesting that there's not a lot of love in marriages, except that book of the Duchess thing that Chaucer actually mentions having written.

Anna Waymack (37:23.617)
We're pretty sure it was commissioned by his patron John of Gaunt after John of Gaunt lost his wife Blanche. The Book of the Duchess is about a character called the Black Knight grieving his lost Lady White. The grief is sometimes called overdone. It is seriously hardcore. You know, the light of my life is gone and I am not getting over it. And...

This isn't necessarily proof that John of Gaunt was real with Lodge, but it's suggestive.

Thomas Lecaque (38:01.78)
guy I wrote my dissertation on Raymond de Saint-Gilles is excommunicated twice for not leaving his first wife and he just shrugs it off and seems to stay with her until she dies. Even though by that point he has changed his fortune so well that the next person he gets married to is the daughter of Roger of Sicily and then after that the daughter of the King of Spain and he stays with his wife until he dies because I'm pretty sure that there's nothing in the archives to say one way or another but like what if he actually likes her?

Anna Waymack (38:04.406)
He's in the screen.

Anna Waymack (38:22.193)
Thank you.

Thomas Lecaque (38:32.212)
What if, what if, and hear me out, people in the Middle Ages are human? Right? Now that's not always great because like, if you ask, what is the greatest love story from the Middle Ages?

Thomas Lecaque (38:45.188)
most kind of like gross, I mean, I'm French, like what is the most like gross French love story of the Middle Ages?

Thomas Lecaque (38:52.708)
Oh, you guys have never been to Paris. It's Abelard and Heloise. And it's the worst, it's the worst. It is the grossest and the worst. Right, cause it's, she's a teacher and then it goes horribly right for us. Like there are examples that seem to be love matches that like are only cute if you ignore literally everything about how they meet.

Anna Waymack (38:56.189)
Oh, well, enough. You can keep the sign on the school bus.

John Wyatt (38:56.91)
Sure.

Anna Waymack (39:12.085)
He said, he's his teacher. I just want to make sure the audience knows. Otherwise, he's her teacher.

Thomas Lecaque (39:17.736)
Yeah, sorry, he's her teacher. He gets, does he get castrated by her uncle? Yeah. And some friends. I mean, I gotta be honest, hashtag team, you know, Heloise's dad in this one.

Anna Waymack (39:22.253)
Yes, yes.

John Wyatt (39:23.337)
Yeah, and some friends, they break in into his room.

Anna Waymack (39:31.045)
They have a kid and named him Astrolab, which is naming your kid Computer.

Thomas Lecaque (39:36.016)
Yep, yep. What, Heloise is then sent to a nunnery to keep them apart, right, and then they write letters for the rest of their lives and then.

John Wyatt (39:36.193)
Thank you.

Jason Herbert (39:37.15)
Is this where Elon gets it?

Anna Waymack (39:41.357)
Yes.

Anna Waymack (39:44.801)
And hers are like, so we're still in love, right? And he's like, my sister in Christ. And she's like, yeah, but we're in romance.

Thomas Lecaque (39:52.552)
Yeah, she seems to say, doesn't she then have his body brought to the nunnery when he dies?

Anna Waymack (39:57.669)
Don't remember.

Thomas Lecaque (40:00.42)
I think that's what ends up happening. There are also really problematic love stories that get championed from the middle ages. There's a ton of bad love poetry. There's even some good love poetry. I really like Geoffrey Rudez's L'Encore les Jaunes si l'Encore Meille during May when the days are long where it's all about, I have heard of this beautiful lady across the sea and I will never shall I enjoy love unless I enjoy this far away love. Like it is sometimes it's like high school boy cringe level.

Anna Waymack (40:09.979)
Yeah

Thomas Lecaque (40:29.32)
You know, love poetry. I think it's real. I think it's cute.

Anna Waymack (40:33.729)
Um, worth pointing out, actually a bit of an aggression, but two of Chaucer's besties, William Neville and John Flanvaux, who got involved when he was in a court case, both knights, both went on crusade, died on crusade, one very shortly after the other, buried together in a tomb where their helmets are like practically kissing and the way things are arranged with their heraldry and such,

Thomas Lecaque (40:59.39)
Oh

Anna Waymack (41:03.421)
is the way it would have been done were they married. So

Is that projecting into the past a bit? Quite possibly, but it's... It seems like there were some real relationships. Although that one's not obviously officially marriage.

John Wyatt (41:23.215)
It's a difficult thing to get at. We don't have a lot of material really explicitly talking about the way that people really felt we have a lot of upper class versions of love. So one of the things that happens with this courtly love that we're talking about is in the 12th century, it's a literary trope. It's a thing that people are writing about this sort of.

Anna Waymack (41:42.609)
Mm-hmm.

John Wyatt (41:45.75)
It's nightly courtly love, which is not actually about marriage and it's not actually about love. It's more about being in love with somebody that you can't actually be with and then going off and protecting her for two while she pines away for you somewhere else. And this is not in the 13th century. It's not really a reflection of what's going on. By the time you get into the 14th and 15th century, people in the upper class are reading these and being like, oh, that's what love is. Okay. So it becomes...

Anna Waymack (42:11.342)
You should be getting physically sick until she returns your love.

John Wyatt (42:16.682)
Yep. So it becomes a thing, but that's really doesn't, does not give us a particularly good glimpse at what's actually going on in most people's lives, not even most nobles lives. And we have the same thing with children. I was thinking of this by this earlier, Thomas, when you're talking about how like medieval people are people. Like in a lot of the 20th century history of Europe, there's medieval Europe, there's this idea that like medieval people didn't love their kids. They just didn't because they didn't write about them.

Anna Waymack (42:44.656)
Oh

John Wyatt (42:46.646)
And like, that's entirely inconsistent with like, people.

Thomas Lecaque (42:52.681)
Yes.

Anna Waymack (42:53.561)
The single hardest thing I have ever read was a chronicle that someone was updating each year. And then it got to the year that the second wave of the Black Death hit his town. And that second wave was, we think, particularly hard on children and young adults. And it goes from this impersonal, you know, these phenomena happened, this king, whatever, to, and then I lost all my children.

And it's... it's heartbreaking.

Like, the odds of reaching adulthood were not what they are now, but that didn't make them any less caring.

John Wyatt (43:39.81)
No. And so when you ask about questions about like, sort of human emotion and feelings and love in the medieval period, it's super difficult to get a hold of because you're dealing with stylized tropes a lot of the time that are talking about something that's maybe partially real, becomes real, isn't real. It's super hard to say.

Thomas Lecaque (44:01.819)
It's also hot.

Anna Waymack (44:01.997)
much of like your approaches to dating in especially high school were influenced by what you saw in movies and read in books right we get these scripts and we don't follow them exactly but

their guidelines.

Thomas Lecaque (44:18.56)
Well, and I mean, how much do we actually write about love now in the kinds of sources that will survive a thousand years?

John Wyatt (44:27.599)
I don't read anything now on the source that'll survive a thousand years.

Thomas Lecaque (44:29.192)
Okay, first of all, nothing from this time period will survive. It will be just like GeoCities, it'll be great.

Anna Waymack (44:32.457)
Um, more like...

Jason Herbert (44:34.382)
I disagree. Have to have none of you listen to Taylor Swift. That stuff's going to last forever. Okay. 1989 it's beautiful. And if you don't like it, that's too bad.

Anna Waymack (44:39.609)
on what we do.

Anna Waymack (44:43.557)
or what medium is surviving and being legible. Whereas Twilight, I hate to say it, has so many physical copies.

Thomas Lecaque (44:50.016)
Yeah, but it's garbage paperback. It's garbage paperback, so it's gonna say, so if you want it to survive, you're gonna go carve it into a stone somewhere, or you're going to write it in leather and go bury it in the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona. Right, so that when the sands claim it and they dig it up 200 years from now, they'll, right? So like.

John Wyatt (44:51.507)
Yeah, it's not that paper's not gonna last.

Anna Waymack (44:53.169)
I'm gonna go get some health.

John Wyatt (45:02.978)
That'd work.

Anna Waymack (45:05.903)
Mm-hmm.

Thomas Lecaque (45:09.092)
I often think about this in the way that we want to talk about like how people felt about their children and how people felt about romantic love and how people felt about their spouses. The people who do the writing, most of the writing that survives in institutional format are members of the church who if they have children should shut the fuck up about it. Right? I am in love with this woman. No, you are not. Scratch her name off of this list. Never speak of this again. We will drive you from the monastic gates. There is just an institutional holding apparatus that is not going to be the-

Anna Waymack (45:24.497)
I'm sorry.

John Wyatt (45:24.95)
Yep.

Thomas Lecaque (45:37.888)
people who are going to tell you about how people felt about, you know, their children and love affairs.

Anna Waymack (45:43.845)
And mostly it's men writing and not women on top of that.

Thomas Lecaque (45:46.64)
Mostly it's men writing and not women. Most of the documents for the laity for quite a while are legal documents, right? You're not writing a journal of how you feel about stuff. You are writing like a book of deeds that proclaim that like, actually, no, I'm a big enough noble that you have to respect my land holdings. It's sources are a problem.

John Wyatt (45:46.743)
Yep.

Anna Waymack (46:00.993)
Now there is the Romance of the Rose, which is all about how you're supposed to do courtship and whatnot, and is dreadfully misogynist. And then we have Christine de Pizan, who's like, You bastard. Let me tell you how women actually feel about this stuff. But for the most part, we don't have that perspective.

Thomas Lecaque (46:24.86)
Yeah. So I tend to think that, again, people in the middle ages are people, right? And if we don't have the sources for how they talk about these topics, again, we don't have healthy sources about this now, right? Like the shit that people sell is like, the pickup artists who are like selling ads on X being like, come, I'll teach you how to neg women into dating you, whatever the fuck that means. Like that's a monster. Oh, Jesus! Yeah!

Anna Waymack (46:38.469)
Yeah!

Jason Herbert (46:47.453)
Okay, I actually read that book. I read that book. I read that.

Thomas Lecaque (46:56.244)
Are you, can you say this in Patton's terms? Like Rommel, you bastard, I read your book. Kids just.

John Wyatt (46:56.33)
How'd it work out for you, man?

Jason Herbert (47:02.541)
I read that book, the book about the nagging book in like 2004. I had frosted tips. I was living in West Palm Beach.

Thomas Lecaque (47:18.676)
Worthy audience for that book, that's beautiful.

John Wyatt (47:21.005)
No.

Jason Herbert (47:21.189)
Well, you know, that book was geared to awkward young men, right? Who want to speak romance to other women and don't know how. So I read the book and the thing I would say about the book is this.

John Wyatt (47:42.19)
Still don't know how.

Jason Herbert (47:45.633)
I'm in a relationship, sir.

many years later. The tips are no longer frosted and the hair is gone. But

It was a lovely written book. The book itself was the Neil Strauss was the guy who wrote the book. He could write. Now I'm not saying that the words we should follow are good. Like as though one should not evoke Hemingway as a modus operandi, but one can appreciate the wordsmithing. He was a Chaucer of his day, Neil Strauss actually. I feel, can you imagine Chaucer writing about negging in 13 in the 1300s? That's what I want to see.

And I want to know how Chaucer nags.

John Wyatt (48:27.934)
Yeah, I can imagine that.

Thomas Lecaque (48:29.732)
Yes, that's it. That's a big stretch.

Anna Waymack (48:30.853)
Hopefully something that Chaucer comes to again and again is seduction, consent, coercion, and all the shades of grey in between those.

Jason Herbert (48:41.965)
So I'm telling you guys 600 years from now, someone's gonna pick up that book, The Art of Seduction or whatever it was. We'll have to put this in the show notes, the Neil Strauss book about negging, right?

Anna Waymack (48:51.641)
look, if they really want that, they can go to Arvid, Ar's armatorial, and then his follow-up, which is like, okay, girls, here's how not to get taken in by the strategies I just put out there in part one.

John Wyatt (48:55.094)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Anna Waymack (49:08.085)
And then since this is all clearly setting up a disaster, the third part, which is how to make yourself fall out of love.

It is a decision.

Jason Herbert (49:16.649)
I have an answer for that, Anna. It is called Papas Pilar, wrong.

John Wyatt (49:22.074)
Hahaha!

Jason Herbert (49:23.085)
not yet a sponsor for the Historians of the Movies podcast, but could be if we want. Actually, if you look here, there's a word, success, Ernest Hemingway right here. So I'm just saying.

Thomas Lecaque (49:23.244)
haha

John Wyatt (49:26.562)
yet

Thomas Lecaque (49:28.904)
yet.

John Wyatt (49:35.059)
Oh, look at that segue. Well done, sir.

Jason Herbert (49:38.378)
Isn't it nice? I try. I'm getting smooth with this smooth like dark cane sugar molasses rum throughout the Caribbean.

Thomas Lecaque (49:46.644)
I do love the fact that the letter is all that poetic verse stuff though. Let's bring it back to the movie because I have nothing to drink guys, I have a bottle of water in my office. It is unfair.

Jason Herbert (49:55.69)
Oh, yeah, and that's where we're at right now. All right.

John Wyatt (49:56.27)
That's, there is no one to blame for that but you, sir. I did wanna, well, to pull back towards the movie, I did wanna say like, we were talking about like people being people, right? And like humans being human now or then, and that's one of the things that I think all of us really love about this movie is like the sort of, talking to my kids about it, cause they watch it with me. And it's like, it's like, it's my favorite medieval movie because it's not accurate in a lot of ways,

Jason Herbert (50:00.061)
Okay, all right. Um,

Thomas Lecaque (50:00.09)
That, that, yeah.

John Wyatt (50:26.754)
more than it looks, but it captures the vibe of it. And it gets to the idea that these were people living, breathing, enjoying life, going to parties, and everything's colorful. And the vivaciousness of the movie is one of its best features, I think.

Anna Waymack (50:43.513)
Yeah. They all have depth to them, even the side characters. Jocelyn's maid servant and all. Like they all are given amusement at things, frustration. And that actually feels like a wonderful tribute to Chaucer because he excels at creating these realistic characters. But yet they're people. You know these people.

Jason Herbert (51:09.141)
Do we get the sense, Anna, that this movie is kind of being written by Chaucer later on?

Anna Waymack (51:14.225)
Oh boy, um, yes. So, can I tell you about the Knight's Tale? Not all Knight's Tale.

Jason Herbert (51:24.698)
Oh, yes, please.

Anna Waymack (51:26.161)
Chaucer writes his Canterbury Tales, which is what he's known for now, although at the time, other stuff. He says he totally, himself, went on a pilgrimage with all these other folks, and he's going to describe them for you. Let me get back at some point to his descriptions of the Partner and the Summoner. They are not flattering. As promised. But one of his characters is a knight who's depicted as a kind of good guy.

And the knight gets to tell his tale first. And it's a very traditional tale. And in it, Theseus, our classical Theseus character has just conquered the Amazons and has married their queen Hippolyta. And her sister Emily is hanging out with them all. Theseus has also done some more conquering and has two prisoners of war.

Palamon and Arsetei are cousins, are besties, and then from their prison they spot Emily and fall dramatically in love, even though they're not sure at first if she's actually human or a goddess. And they immediately become worsties instead of besties because which of them should get Emily, who at this point does not know that they exist. And as Namazon probably wouldn't care that they exist.

Shenanigans happen. They both wind up, escape from prison or out of prison. Being young men in love, they make bad decisions. Chaucer's characters often make bad decisions. And get in a fight where Theseus finds them and is like, you're not supposed to be here. Oh, you're in love with my sister-in-law. Tell you what. You get to assemble teams. We're going to have a big tournament. And whoever wins gets to marry Emily.

Anna Waymack (53:24.313)
beforehand they all make their prayers. And Varsitya prays to Mars the god of war. Can I please win this tournament? Palamon prays to Venus the goddess of love. I want Emily. Emily prays to Diana the virgin goddess of the hunt. Neither? Like not with the marriage thing but if I have to give me the one who loves me best.

Thomas Lecaque (53:45.413)
Yeah!

Anna Waymack (53:54.865)
tournament happens, no one dies, it's a whole fun day for everyone, Arsete wins. But before marrying Emily, he gets I think bitten by a snake or something or thrown from his horse and he dies. And on his deathbed is like, Palamon, bro, I want you to marry her.

So everyone gets their prayer except kind of Emily, who gets literally screwed. And we can see some of this is in a knight's tale with the two dudes who are battling it out over Jocelyn, who's initially kind of like sick of the whole thing.

Anna Waymack (54:39.881)
Now, the dudes are not besties at any point, right? There's a lot of adaptation going on, but it's a pretty clear source. The other clear source is Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, where to prove his love for Guinevere, he is told he has to lose Purnimonts until she changes her mind and says, okay, win.

So a lot of this is just lifted straight from medieval texts.

Anna Waymack (55:11.813)
Sorry, that's the quick and dirty spark notes.

Jason Herbert (55:16.125)
Yeah, I remember watching this thinking every single time that I saw it when she does the flip flop on the do you have to lose then you have to win. You just like you. Right. Oh, totally right. All right. Um,

Anna Waymack (55:24.433)
Totally medieval.

Thomas Lecaque (55:25.608)
Yep, yep. Okay, but I'm sorry, we're gonna have to put in the quote there when he gets the information, when his arm is busy, his shoulders busy being like undislocated, and he says that, what is it? It's something like, I love her blah blah. For that I say my rosary to Jocelyn alone, and Watts like, William, that's blasphemy, and that turns it really hard is just a great moment.

Anna Waymack (55:27.601)
I'm going to do.

John Wyatt (55:34.647)
Heh.

Anna Waymack (55:44.087)
Yes.

John Wyatt (55:44.803)
Mm-hmm.

Anna Waymack (55:53.029)
But then he gets in the tournament again, having been told to win, and is like, I hate her.

Thomas Lecaque (55:56.756)
There's your there's your love there. She is the embodiment of yes, and oh how I hate her. Oh, it's so good

Jason Herbert (56:03.549)
God, this film does not have any right, having such clever writing, because it is so, and we're gonna get to the writing. Do we wanna do the writing, or do we wanna do the music first? Which one do you wanna go with? Wanna talk about music? All right, let's talk about the music. I wanna introduce a new segment to the Historicist of the Movies podcast called My Friend Craig Bruce Smith is Wrong. And...

Thomas Lecaque (56:08.041)
Ugh.

John Wyatt (56:29.441)
the

Jason Herbert (56:32.869)
I say this because Craig is... Well, a great many things. I say this because Craig, if he's listening, knows that I absolutely dearly love Craig. He's actually the very first time we ever did a pod. It was with Craig. Many times the HATM came out of a conversation that I had with him and Robert Green about Predator. So I hope if Craig is out there listening, he's anger ball right now. Because Craig has a problem with the music, with the anachronism of the music. And let's talk about the music. Because...

Thomas Lecaque (56:34.231)
Okay, what was Craig wrong about this time?

Thomas Lecaque (56:52.256)
he is.

Thomas Lecaque (57:00.334)
Oh, okay, so he's just straight up wrong.

Jason Herbert (57:02.377)
He's straight up wrong, and that's why we're calling this My Friend Craig Bruce Smith is wrong.

John Wyatt (57:02.582)
There.

Thomas Lecaque (57:05.213)
Yeah.

Anna Waymack (57:07.777)
He is. I'm sure he's a lovely person. And we are all wrong about him being the system.

Jason Herbert (57:10.301)
He's not, but he's my friend. So let's talk very tiny arms. So, uh.

Jason Herbert (57:24.165)
They're coated in like sleeves and everything. So let's, Craig, if you know him, is six foot 19 inches tall and is a fan of George Washington and bad movie takes. So let's talk about the inaccuracies. Let's talk about the brilliance of this soundtrack and what song really does it for you. The floor is yours guys.

Thomas Lecaque (57:47.68)
The opening is perfect in every goddamn way. No notes, 10 out of 10. And people who don't like that should just not watch this movie. They don't deserve it.

John Wyatt (57:58.806)
And what really sells it, and it is, I think, not just the queen, which is great for the scene, but the fact that they're into it, they are singing it. It's not music that's happening over the top that only the audience gets to know. It's the entire scene. And that's great. That tells you right off the bat that this is a movie about people enjoying life and

being into the moment. And I think like Anna was talking about earlier about sort of the translation of it, right? Like it, yes, they would not have been listening to Queen, but they might well have been singing something else. And like, that wouldn't make any sense to us, but Queen makes sense to us because like, that's a stadium song, God damn it. We know what it means.

Anna Waymack (58:39.729)
And to us it's unfulfilling.

Anna Waymack (58:49.809)
I have had We Will Rock You stuck in my head all day just because of this. They're absolutely worst songs. And Of Queen, that's maybe my least favorite song actually, but Of Queen, which means like it's pretty high up there.

Jason Herbert (58:53.837)
There are worse songs. Yeah, absolutely.

Thomas Lecaque (59:02.06)
really well in that moment.

John Wyatt (59:04.962)
But it's also, it's socially evocative in some very specific ways that matter for the scene.

Anna Waymack (59:10.206)
We know that feeling of cheering for a team.

Thomas Lecaque (59:15.604)
And like, I don't, maybe I'm wrong and maybe you guys know better than me, but like, I don't know that we actually have a great sense of what secular music genuinely sounds like, right? We might have notation, we might have surviving instruments, but like for secular music, like non-vocal music, I don't know that we have great scores before like what, 15th century? Survivors, like we might have some ideas about like what instruments they could play, but like whatever you're about to do with them is a modern...

John Wyatt (59:39.342)
Thanks, that's right.

Thomas Lecaque (59:45.44)
notion of the music anyway, so why have some bullshit pretense that you're doing it accurately when you could just go for it and feel joy?

Anna Waymack (59:54.437)
Well, I'm willing to bet that amateur bagpipers now and amateur bagpipers then are alerted by the heavy drops and thunderstorms. But yeah, it's one of those places where we pretend to inaccuracy that we're nowhere near.

Jason Herbert (59:59.658)
Sounded just as awful.

Thomas Lecaque (01:00:00.972)
Okay, fair enough.

Thomas Lecaque (01:00:11.592)
We want to do a medievalism, right? And we want to do the medievalism that feels like the right medievalism, right? It's we are going to do, we're going to do an orchestra. Cool, those instruments didn't exist. And would have sounded like that.

Jason Herbert (01:00:22.561)
Do you guys have a favorite from good? Do you guys have a favorite song from this film? Is there a moment? Is it, we will rock you? Is it, I mean, you've got Queen, ACDC, Bowie.

Anna Waymack (01:00:35.985)
And the favorite scene, maybe not song, but scene, really is that dance because of how it makes visible what the movie is doing. That shift from a stylized dance that could plausibly be medieval, it is so alien to us. I have no idea if it is or not, but Alien to us looks slow and boring into a dance party.

Thomas Lecaque (01:01:03.628)
Mm-hmm.

Anna Waymack (01:01:05.941)
And that transition, I think, helps to explain the rest.

Thomas Lecaque (01:01:10.42)
Yeah, yeah. It's the joy of that scene, right? It's the fact that like, again, if the emphasis is to make the middle ages feel real, to make them feel lived in the people who lived in them to feel normal, that scene is so perfect for that in every way.

John Wyatt (01:01:11.926)
Yep.

Jason Herbert (01:01:25.534)
That's why this film succeeds so much. It humanizes the medieval era. You know? Alright.

John Wyatt (01:01:33.822)
And again, there's a moment there where Heath Ledger is mouthing the words, right? Again, the music is part of the scene. It's not just sort of overlay for the audience.

Jason Herbert (01:01:43.661)
Because that's what you do when you dance.

Jason Herbert (01:01:49.805)
If you guys never seen me sing Billie Jean, I mean, come on. Like we danced at the Southern Historical Association too, you know? So, um, let's promise.

Anna Waymack (01:01:58.285)
And I'll add in, like, I poked around with the costuming and saw someone had criticized especially Jocelyn's dress in that scene, because that shade of chartreuse is not good on anyone. But you look at all her fashion, and that's not the point. She's just being stylish, which is often not about the male gaze. So her dancing in that scene, the costuming in that scene is true to how we do things now.

Thomas Lecaque (01:02:26.784)
Yes, absolutely.

Jason Herbert (01:02:28.981)
All right, we're going to get into ledger here in a few moments. I want to save a section for ledger, but I want to talk about quotes. Thomas and I have been like texting each other romantic lines all week. From this film. To be fair, it's a lot better. You know, it's a lot better than when we did the 13th warrior when Thomas and I are talking about geese all week. So kind of translation line every single time. We got to talk about that in the terms of like when we do a pod.

Thomas Lecaque (01:02:40.136)
We do that anyway, this time it's not just us to each other.

Jason Herbert (01:02:58.429)
of best scenes in film history. Someone's going to look at us go 13th warrior really. And we're going to go, yeah, that scene it's perfect. All right. It's so.

Thomas Lecaque (01:03:02.568)
Yeah

Anna Waymack (01:03:04.849)
We could have more decalable mantles.

Jason Herbert (01:03:09.585)
My mother was.

Thomas Lecaque (01:03:11.616)
a pure woman and at least I know who my father was.

Jason Herbert (01:03:15.413)
My father is, you pig eating son of a whore. God, I love that movie. Oh, can we do, I can't wait till we go back to do The 13th Warrior the second time. Oh, we're doing it every year. All right. That's like I'm live. All right, so favorite quotes from this film because this film, we've been dropping these quotes all day but this one's got some real great zingers in it and some really beautiful lines in it.

Go for it guys, your favorite quotes.

John Wyatt (01:03:50.51)
There's a whole bunch of them. I'm going to start with one that probably doesn't mean anything to anybody else, but it does to me, which is... No, it's about eels.

Jason Herbert (01:03:57.929)
See you next time, guys.

Jesus Christ.

Thomas Lecaque (01:04:02.484)
Yes it fucking is. Yes it goddamn is.

John Wyatt (01:04:03.178)
Yeah. Damn straight. All right. So this right at the very beginning of the movie, after, um, after William wins his first tournament, they split up the money and all three of them are talking about like what they're going to do with their money. Right. And Roland says, this is enough money for me to go back to England and Watts starts daydreaming about food because that's what he does. Um, and the first thing he says, the first bit of food that he daydreams about is eel pies. I'm going to go to a tavern and I'm going to get eel pie. And I love that because, um, well, I wrote an entire dissertation about why eels are an intrinsic part of like early English.

identity. So like the fact that you've got this English guy in France finally gets his money, he's like, oh my God, finally I can go eat eels. Just really made me happy. It is not one of the most memorable lines in the movie, but it stood out to me. For me, maybe my favorite line in the entire movie is Trosser's intro line, right? Where he walks past them naked and they're like, sir, what are you doing? It's like, trudging, you know, to trudge.

Jason Herbert (01:04:38.92)
Mmm.

Jason Herbert (01:04:51.809)
to trench.

Thomas Lecaque (01:05:02.016)
Can you hit me with the whole line because it's so good.

John Wyatt (01:05:04.89)
Oh, boy, I don't think I can remember it exactly. The slow, determined walk of a man who has nothing else to lose. Nothing to lose. On the other hand, trudging does suggest resolve. Yeah. The entire scene is great. I mean, Bettany's character, we talked about this, but Bettany's character is fantastic. But that opening line just gets me every time.

Anna Waymack (01:05:10.993)
Nothing left to lose. Not that there's nothing left to lose, gambling problem that we know of, but...

Thomas Lecaque (01:05:24.757)
So.

Jason Herbert (01:05:31.741)
According to Chaucer, what happens then is as you are matriculating up to the historical ranks and you go to defend your dissertation and you walk into the room, you are not walking so much as trudging because you have nothing left to lose at that point. You're 10 years in, you're... Let's go. I want to talk about eels or cows. Right? So...

Thomas Lecaque (01:05:51.008)
You have to get through the snake fight portion of your dissertation defense first, but it's fine.

Anna Waymack (01:05:53.37)
Right.

Jason Herbert (01:05:55.817)
One of the great memes of academic history is that. All right, Thomas, tell me something romantic again.

Thomas Lecaque (01:06:00.728)
Ah! I mean, okay, so listen, for somebody who spent as much time being a troll on Twitter, I'm a giant fucking softie of a human being. So I've got three. They are my three favorite lines in this, because again, I am a giant softie. Your name makes no matter to me so long as I can call you my own.

Thomas Lecaque (01:06:24.78)
Fuck man, that is, yep, that is.

Jason Herbert (01:06:27.645)
You are not doing the before midnight trilogy with me is all I can say. You'll cry the whole time. You and Ethan Hawke. Go on.

Thomas Lecaque (01:06:31.816)
whole time it'll just be me weeping and drinking in the corner. Yeah. Um, and then the next two are in the same section when they're all telling him to run. To know you William would take a lifetime. One I am most willing to give followed by yes William with the pigs. With the pigs the poor can marry for love. Here's the thing all anyone really wants is for somebody

Anna Waymack (01:06:48.805)
with the pigs.

John Wyatt (01:06:49.934)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Herbert (01:06:50.689)
pigs.

Thomas Lecaque (01:06:58.76)
to choose them in spite of all of the obstacles in the way. That's all they want, to be known, to be loved, to be chosen in spite of it all. Dear God, this movie is lovely.

Jason Herbert (01:07:15.265)
All right, Anna.

Anna Waymack (01:07:17.465)
this is going to be a weird one but when the black prince goes but my personal historians discovered that he's of an ancient royal line because that is just such authentically medieval bullshit. I think it's the abbey of Petersburg that at one point it's

John Wyatt (01:07:34.286)
Thanks for watching!

Anna Waymack (01:07:46.193)
definitely got given these specific lands. Trust us.

John Wyatt (01:07:52.486)
Yeah, watching that scene, my nine-year-old was like, oh, so he's descended from a king? I'm like, no. No, not at all. But it is beyond contestation at that point. I would add that maybe my, actually, like one of my favorite parts of this movie isn't in the theatrical release. And Thomas and I were talking about this earlier today. But so it's from that scene at the stocks, right, where his men come out to defend him, right? And so.

Anna Waymack (01:07:56.633)
Uh-uh.

Thomas Lecaque (01:07:58.268)
He is now. He definitely is now.

Anna Waymack (01:08:02.874)
desk.

John Wyatt (01:08:22.07)
Roland stands by him as he should and so does the Ferris and Watt wants to fight everybody. And then Chaucer comes out and what we see in the theatrical version is Chaucer sort of tries to fight everybody too and then the Black Prince intervenes. But there is a scene there that was not in the theatrical edition that is Chaucer giving a speech that quiets the crowd down. And it is maybe the best speech in the entire movie. It's fantastic. Like he stops trying to fight and starts doing the thing he's good at, which is talking.

some food at him and he sort of touches it and licks his mouth and says, mother, is my mother here? I'd recognize that too. I'd recognize that cooking anywhere. Right. And everybody kind of laughs a little bit and starts listening to him. And then he sort of gives a speech about William and his heart. And it sets, among other things, it sets up the Black Prince's sort of intervention a little bit better. But

Anna Waymack (01:09:01.858)
Excuse me.

John Wyatt (01:09:19.49)
That scene I really like and I had forgotten that it wasn't in the theatrical release, which is what I was watching the other day. And I was really disappointed because it wasn't there. That's really good. But aside from the bits that we've all noted, the movie has just a ton of fantastic one-liners. We'll make your entrails into your extrails. Yeah.

Jason Herbert (01:09:39.889)
Can I offer one on my own?

Jason Herbert (01:09:44.437)
JW, you're talking about the Black Knight, and there's a great line, because there's this real idea that he and William kind of see into each other. There's a real respect between Edward and William. And there's this great line when they first meet where he says, you didn't yield. He goes, it's not in me to withdraw. And Edward says, nor in me, but it happens sometimes. And William's like, it does, right? And I'm like, I was watching it last night, I go like, God.

Anna Waymack (01:09:57.019)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Herbert (01:10:14.037)
That line hits me. That, these are two guys that get me. And it's also like, boy, there's a pair, there is a real part of like who we are, just as people that sums us up, like I wanna fight, I wanna go through and it's not likely to quit. But even I have, you know, sometimes, boy, that one just kind of cut through me as I was watching it last night. It really made a lot of sense to me. And then the other one, of course, Jocelyn, the run and I will run with you. And this goes along with Thomas. I mean, but.

There are just, there's so much. Oh, and the funny one, maybe the thing I think about, the quote I think about most in this film is, it's called, Hello, hello. I mean, that's.

Anna Waymack (01:10:45.969)
Must everything be on a man's schedule?

John Wyatt (01:10:49.307)
Hmm, uh huh.

Thomas Lecaque (01:10:58.156)
Hmm. Yes, given the timing of when the film came out and thinking about it as a historical artifact of like being the last medieval film pre-911, better a silly girl with a flower than a silly boy with a lamp, with a stick. That one hits really differently when you put it into some kind of bigger context.

Anna Waymack (01:11:13.919)
Oh, yeah.

Anna Waymack (01:11:19.209)
there's a flower without its petals and yeah.

Thomas Lecaque (01:11:22.965)
Yeah.

Jason Herbert (01:11:24.085)
All right. We need to talk about another historical aspect here. Uh, and I want to get now into Ledger and I'm going to introduce with you guys a couple of different things here because he, Ledger we all know it gets taken from as far too young. I have argued in the past will continue to do so that I think he was the best actor of his generation. I think that if he were still with us, he would be dominating screens right now. Maybe not even on the big budget kind of stuff, but the small stuff that like the demands scale.

was really only even beginning to become apparent. If you look at his filmography, I don't know that another actor erupts on the scene, maybe unless we're talking about Tom Cruise. And I wanna give you some years in films, okay? 1999, 10 Things I Hate About You. 2000, yeah. 2000, The Patriot. 2001.

Anna Waymack (01:12:16.629)
Best of your adaptation. Hands down.

Thomas Lecaque (01:12:19.382)
Yes.

Jason Herbert (01:12:23.101)
A night's tale. And this film, this film was really the one where they start to sell ledger as the, as the lead you man, along with monsters ball, smaller film, right? An actor's film, right? 2002, the four feathers 2003, Ned Kelly, 2003 the order sees him reunited with Shannon Sossaman. Five, we get broke back the brothers grim Casanova Lords of Dogtown 2008 the dark night. We get 10 years in this time.

with Heath Ledger, you know.

Jason Herbert (01:12:58.209)
Has there ever been an actor with a stronger entrance into Hollywood, into our collective consciousness than what Ledger had? He had the entry with the really, really the entry into like, like you're saying, Anna, with the perfect Shakespearean film, teen film, right? A lot of people, I'm Gen X, a lot of millennials. So Gen X will consider, uh, Breakfast Club to be the best high school film ever made. Many millennials consider to be 10 things I hate about you to be the best high school film ever made. Every generation has its own version.

kind of the perfect intro to him. We get the supporting role with Patriot, and then we get this. What do we think about Heath Ledger's emergence on the screen?

Anna Waymack (01:13:47.537)
I think I'm leaving this to the other two because I am not a movie buff. I mean, he's cute, but I can't really differentiate great acting from media.

Thomas Lecaque (01:13:51.04)
Hmm.

Thomas Lecaque (01:13:58.002)
Hmm.

Jason Herbert (01:13:58.265)
I see this film, and I see this film specifically as the emergence of a super megastar. And there are two scenes in particular. One is commonly a gif. It's him sitting on horseback looking at Jocelyn and it's the wink. And then as we've talked about earlier, and especially the dance scene, I feel like when we watch him dance to Golden Years and he does like this, he starts to open it up. And when he does this hop.

in the middle of this dance, you see the emergence of a next level actor and superstar. I feel like we see Heath Ledger go from actor to superstar in this film. What do you guys think?

Thomas Lecaque (01:14:44.684)
I mean, yes, right? Though saying that he's not already there after 10 Things I Hate About You is hard for me because I love that film so much. I actually think like the meteoric stardom is less interesting than, I mean, my preparation was not reading up on jousting, mine was reading trivia about this movie. And they filmed this in the Czech Republic and people thought they were gonna have a lot of prep work to do. And so people...

Jason Herbert (01:15:02.925)
Sure, go for it.

Thomas Lecaque (01:15:12.728)
The cast came really, really early and then actually didn't have anything to do. They learned some of the sword fights in the first couple days and they just had a couple of weeks of just all of them hanging out together in Prague. And what everyone seems to remember about this is how charismatic Ledger was, how kind he was, how he became the leader of a group of people who are all older than him.

Jason Herbert (01:15:25.485)
Best city ever.

Thomas Lecaque (01:15:38.508)
how he took care of Alan Tudyk after one of Alan Tudyk's friends died of a drug overdose. And Heath Ledger tracked him down to the bar that he was drowning his sorrows and just took care of him for a couple days. People came out of this movie not only like, yes, Heath Ledger is going to be a star, but Heath Ledger is one of the good people in film. And there's something about it that he...

comes across as incredibly charismatic and funny and wild and super energetic, but also like you believe that all of these people like him enough that they'd stand in front of the stockades with him. And the reason that works is that they've just spent a month actually spending every day together all day. A group of friends hang out before they start filming and they all actually like the man.

Jason Herbert (01:16:21.053)
Oh, the chemistry in the film, even with Rufus Sule, like you get a sense that like, and I love Rufus Sule as an actor. Like I wish I saw him more as a hero kind of a character because he gets cat typecast, right? Because I really, really like Rufus Sule. I think he's phenomenal. You get a sense that these people really like each other. The chemistry in this film is so much fun. Mark Addy, you know, Shannon Sossman.

Thomas Lecaque (01:16:23.798)
Yeah.

Thomas Lecaque (01:16:31.863)
He wishes he would too. Yes. I said that repeatedly.

John Wyatt (01:16:33.259)
Yeah.

Thomas Lecaque (01:16:48.66)
Yes.

Jason Herbert (01:16:50.461)
And the chemistry between Heath Ledger and Shannon Sossman is

Jossarian? I don't know. I don't know if there's good camera. I'm totally thinking again. Yes, Anna is like It's it's good. It's it's really good. So here's my question if we I hate to do this Has if Ledger survives If Ledger survives and I wish she did and you could cast him in anything Who would you have cast who is your?

Anna Waymack (01:17:03.754)
That's romances.

Thomas Lecaque (01:17:14.933)
You don't.

Jason Herbert (01:17:25.557)
dream person you would have cast ledger as? Do you have somebody?

John Wyatt (01:17:33.706)
You know, you asked this question in the email you sent out, and I gave it a lot of thought. And I didn't come up with anything. And I think because he's an awfully malleable actor. He's really good and so good that I had trouble sort of pigeonholing him into a movie. Like,

Jason Herbert (01:17:37.607)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Herbert (01:17:47.969)
He's so good.

Anna Waymack (01:17:58.209)
It's clearly between this and the joke.

John Wyatt (01:18:05.336)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I gave that question a lot of thought, and I couldn't actually come up with, like, oh, he would be great as x, because I think he'd be great at just about anything.

Jason Herbert (01:18:05.685)
I-

Jason Herbert (01:18:16.245)
You know, he wins the Oscar for Joker, and deservedly so. And I remember when they were making the film, people were saying, oh my God, you guys, you know, there was all this stuff like, oh, they cast Joe. I remember they, like there was, at the time, how could they cast Ledger? We didn't appreciate Ledger at the time for what he was going to be. And there was all this talk about, oh, Joker. And then he comes out and does this performance. But I gotta tell you, his performance at Brokeback Mountain as Enos, I think is one of the most,

beautiful, heartbreaking roles I've ever seen. It's one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen as far as a romance goes.

that deeply introspective role, boy, I have a hard time picking up many actors who do better job in a single role than he is in Burk Back. Boy, I just losing will ledger hurts because I was telling this to Thomas the other day, I was walking around the other day thinking, God, I'm angry sometimes that we lost this gift to artistry. This guy who could encapsulate so much of the human condition.

You know, it's phenomenal. I don't know where else to take this part of the conversation, but acknowledging it maybe is enough. I don't know.

Thomas Lecaque (01:19:36.716)
I think the real joy of Heath Ledger is not just that he would have been good in any role and so you could cast him in whatever comes to mind. It's the fact that he made such interesting choices. You have a couple of roles that are like you're clearly pushing him into your like these let's do pretty boy war movie blockbusters and then he's gonna be like well that was fun let's go back to doing stuff I really want. I am going to I am no longer gonna do like brooding teenager what if I am what if I am a gay cowboy?

Anna Waymack (01:19:50.85)
Mm-hmm.

Thomas Lecaque (01:20:03.1)
And what if we really commit to this role? And then like, oh, wait, you think I'm too pretty? What if I'm the Joker? Oh, that's too serious? And you're heading into the imaginary of Dr. Parnassus, which I'm sorry, it's a Terry Gillan movie. You were going in a whole different genre of what on earth this could be. I would have loved to have seen where he went with that. What would he have chosen to do next if he had another 10 years? Or would he have gotten to the point that he'd done everything he wanted to do and he'd find something else to do with his life?

Whatever choice he made, it would have been interesting to see where he went, because he could have gone anywhere he wanted to.

Jason Herbert (01:20:42.093)
Is there anything you don't like about this movie?

Thomas Lecaque (01:20:48.724)
have to have a DVD to watch it right now because it's not available on any of the streaming services I subscribe to.

Jason Herbert (01:20:55.105)
That's a whole other conversation about digital media and so forth right now.

John Wyatt (01:20:55.432)
Uh

Thomas Lecaque (01:20:57.48)
Yeah, no, I have a DVD. It's in my DVD player at my house. No, no, I'm covered on this. I love this movie.

John Wyatt (01:21:03.322)
It plays into the nationalist idea about the Black Prince as this sort of paragon of virtue. And he gets cast against Rufus Tull's character, who is clearly the villain. And there's this interesting scene where Tull shows up back in London. And they're like, oh, he came back because the Black Prince like.

told him he had to disband his army in Southern France because they were pillaging towns. I was like, no, that's what the Black Prince was doing. And then after he won Poitiers, the English paid off all of their mercenaries and brought them back home, or most of them, and the French didn't. So you do have free companies wandering around Southern France pillaging and burning towns and things, but a lot of them are not the English ones. Anyway. But I don't...

Jason Herbert (01:21:38.408)
There's a reason why he's the black prince. Yeah.

John Wyatt (01:22:00.71)
It makes for easy storytelling, but I don't like the fact that those two characters are so uncomplicated in terms of they're good and they're bad. So that's a pretty minor quibble though. Mostly I really just like this movie.

Jason Herbert (01:22:17.885)
Anna, what do you think?

Anna Waymack (01:22:20.417)
I don't love how binary the class system looks. We've talked a bit about that earlier, but there is a middle class. There are people who are in professions, are making money, have their own sorts of influence, and they just seem absent entirely, other than maybe are blacksmiths?

John Wyatt (01:22:24.547)
Hmm.

John Wyatt (01:22:48.546)
Blacksmith and the partner in the Summoner.

Jason Herbert (01:22:51.605)
I wish we talked about the black synth more, I love her, I love Kate. I love Kate in this role.

Anna Waymack (01:22:52.101)
And that's the other thing I love. I kind of wonder with her like Nike swoosh, which apparently they had to get permission after the fact. And so I wonder if that swoosh that's for a female Greek goddess of victory for a female blacksmith is maybe a subtle reference to the whole like Amazon thing in the night's tale, but that's a stretch I realize. That's a big stretch.

Jason Herbert (01:22:59.769)
Mm.

Anna Waymack (01:23:21.881)
The Partner and Summoner, I wish they had more depth. And this is incredibly nitpicky. Chaucer's depiction of his Partner and Summoner character, real unflattering. Like, whoa. As he promised, those are the two characters in Canterbury Tales that get read most often as queer. And that was definitely going on when this movie was written, was...

John Wyatt (01:23:37.194)
as he promised.

Anna Waymack (01:23:51.797)
scripted, whatever. So I... Given how much everyone else or almost everyone else in the film gets complex motivations and all of the... I wish they'd had a bit more.

Jason Herbert (01:24:10.205)
We're going to it up.

John Wyatt (01:24:12.454)
That's a fair point. And they are kind of big characters. I picked them out here because we were thinking about like, where is the middle class? And like, okay, well, these are people who aren't nobles and who aren't peasants and like, clearly have money. But like, there is an entire class of, not sort of sleazy, gambling mobsters, but like, there's an entire class of like a middle class of people who are in between the Gannishead, in between what we see.

Anna Waymack (01:24:20.345)
You know, it's just sort of a middle class.

Anna Waymack (01:24:38.865)
You're encadling Schultz for the sleazy gambling mobsters because he's kind of giving some of those vibes.

John Wyatt (01:24:43.71)
Okay, it's true, it's true.

Jason Herbert (01:24:47.081)
You know, here's the amazing thing about this film. I was thinking, God, this is an awfully nimble film. We get in and out in an hour and 35, hour 40 minutes. I just checked. It's two hours and 12 minutes long. And yet, this movie feels like it's about 27 minutes long. The pacing of this film.

is cranking they really nail moving us along from point to point to introducing everyone and they do that extremely well and really quickly moving us along get us to point blah i mean i didn't know this was almost two and a half hours long

John Wyatt (01:25:25.826)
I had that same reaction because I watch it with my kids and we sat down to watch it on Sunday night. And I was like, oh, this is like an hour and a half movie. It'll be fine. And we're like an hour and a half in and it's the kids bedtime. Wait, we still got 45 minutes to go here. I was really... No, no, he doesn't. So I was really surprised by the length and it doesn't feel it. It really doesn't.

Anna Waymack (01:25:40.827)
The universe doesn't sit.

Jason Herbert (01:25:52.923)
Okay. Um, all right. I want to ask you guys to go Thomas, you're, you're dying to say something. I see it in your face.

Thomas Lecaque (01:25:57.484)
No, I think part of it's just like the brightness and the light of the film, right? We have gotten so used to like movies that are just dark and gloomy and drag, they drag your soul out of you. There's a color palette design to make you think you are in a Norse hell. This is, it's bright and it's fun and it's lively and it's energetic and it carries you along.

Jason Herbert (01:26:01.035)
Yeah.

Jason Herbert (01:26:05.025)
The Northmen, I'm telling you. Yeah.

Jason Herbert (01:26:15.445)
This movie is fun!

Anna Waymack (01:26:18.865)
to ask how much of Barbie's recent popularity is because it actually had colours and you could understand what the hell they were saying! Like, sorry that scared my cat, but-

Jason Herbert (01:26:18.933)
This movie, go ahead.

Thomas Lecaque (01:26:30.717)
But also like why early MCU is like so great. I don't know that they're actually that great of movies, but they make such a palette cleanse. Like Iron Man where there's actually color and there are jokes.

Anna Waymack (01:26:35.343)
Yeah!

Anna Waymack (01:26:42.809)
You can see what's happening and you can hear what's happening. These shouldn't be optional.

Jason Herbert (01:26:43.286)
Yeah.

Thomas Lecaque (01:26:46.045)
Yeah, yes.

Jason Herbert (01:26:52.465)
All right. What? Get up.

John Wyatt (01:26:57.007)
I'm laughing at both of them, but in absolute agreement.

Jason Herbert (01:27:02.961)
Okay, good. All right. I want to move on to our to your top three. We talked about a little bit about this earlier I know this is coming along but for people new to the pod who haven't had a chance to go back to listen to Robin Hood Prince of Thieves or the 13th warrior or Kingdom of heaven those are the other three pods that you guys have been on and it's our first time What are your top three medieval films

Anna Waymack (01:27:29.393)
I think we're rude that this is the first.

Jason Herbert (01:27:29.461)
J-Dub? Oh, it's gotta be right. It's the best, best video we've ever made.

John Wyatt (01:27:33.822)
Yeah, and I suspect that's true for all of us. I know for Thomas and me. So I think we talked about this when we did the 13th Warrior, but my top three medieval movies are this. This is the first one. And then the 13th Warrior is probably number two. And number three is The Name of the Rose, which is like Sean Connery murder mystery in a library. I love libraries, man. Oh, that's right. Yeah.

Jason Herbert (01:27:54.687)
Now we've...

We did that on the Sunday night thing and people were really surprised at how much they enjoyed it. Yeah.

Thomas Lecaque (01:28:04.076)
I mean, mine are easy because we've now done all three of mine, and I guess I can put the Middle Ages to rest when I offer for HATM. It is Knight's Tale, and then, you know, no competition, but quite far down from there, Thirteenth Warrior, which I love. And then Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. I've achieved my goals here with medieval movies. Very happy.

John Wyatt (01:28:26.642)
to become an Americanist man.

Thomas Lecaque (01:28:28.413)
I'm here, I'm ready. We're gonna do La Land next.

Jason Herbert (01:28:30.261)
Thomas, Thomas is scheduled for La Land is called Thomas and Jason work shit out. So

Thomas Lecaque (01:28:37.182)
That's just that's just therapy. We won't be recording that there will be much leaving.

Jason Herbert (01:28:40.773)
Anna that is actually gonna be a live one where he and I watch and we're like, oh they're dancing Oh the colors this yellow. Oh, it's pretty. Oh jazz. Oh God, they don't end up together to kind of the last ten minutes that movie I've never wanted to throw a television through a wall so much of my life. Um, I Hate it. All right, Anna. What do you got?

Thomas Lecaque (01:28:56.096)
Really? Oh, it's the perfect knitting.

Anna Waymack (01:29:00.217)
Knight's Tale. I'm not going to put 13th Warrior on the list. The translation scene will take first if it were all like that, but it's not! I love the translation scene. I love the scene with the mead where, oh, from bees! Okay!

Jason Herbert (01:29:05.889)
How dare you?

Jason Herbert (01:29:18.878)
IT'S HONEY!

Anna Waymack (01:29:19.893)
It gets too frickin' weird, and I know that's the book's fault. But still. Um... No one's mentioned Monty Python on the Holy Grail. No, it's because Kathleen Kennedy's coconuts!

Thomas Lecaque (01:29:29.565)
Oh my God.

Jason Herbert (01:29:30.125)
We still have not done that on this pod.

John Wyatt (01:29:33.602)
Mm-hmm, yeah.

Anna Waymack (01:29:36.201)
and it has an actual medievalist helping to write it. So I'm gonna guilt trip you all on that one and I'm going to leave my third spot blank because I have yet to see a lion in winter.

Thomas Lecaque (01:29:49.205)
Now that's.

Anna Waymack (01:29:49.589)
And I'm guessing that's going on right now. So at some point.

John Wyatt (01:29:51.734)
It's very good, it's very good.

Thomas Lecaque (01:29:53.164)
Very good.

Thomas Lecaque (01:29:58.136)
I actually feel like, well done, I feel great amounts of shame now for not having mentioned Monty Python. Yeah, I have failed as a human. No, no, I mean, like, and you're going to be able to hold this over me forever. This shame is never going to go away. No, no, no. And here's the thing. Every time I'm going to hang my head down and somewhere in the distance, Charlie Brown music will play. You know, give me five more years. I will have that level of baldness. It's fine.

Anna Waymack (01:30:03.717)
I'm guilt-tripping you.

Jason Herbert (01:30:05.324)
Buh-buh.

John Wyatt (01:30:08.386)
She will, by the way. She absolutely will.

Anna Waymack (01:30:09.946)
You know.

Anna Waymack (01:30:22.132)
Great.

Jason Herbert (01:30:22.441)
Mighty Python is one of the few films we've done twice on HATM on Sunday nights. There's that. National Treasure, I can't remember what else we've done, but it's, oh, a Black Panther we've done twice. I once have to chat with Bozeman past. Um, and I think there's, there's one other film hanging around out there that we've done. All right. New Scholarship. Give me one book in the middle ages. Something you haven't given me before that you like.

Thomas Lecaque (01:30:26.866)
It's so good.

John Wyatt (01:30:28.558)
It really is.

John Wyatt (01:30:49.102)
So I'm going to point not to a book per se, but to Monica Green's more recent work on the origins of the Black Death, looking at DNA analysis of trying to figure out where it's coming from and tracing its origins back into the Central Asian steppes and thinking about it as four distinct strands of plague that we know now rather than one and thinking about pushing us to think about.

There's a narrative that the Black Death is primarily European because it doesn't show up in other archives, but are we actually thinking about other archives in the right way? Her work sort of pushes in both of those directions at once, and it's really super useful. So that was sort of where I would go, Monica Green's work on the plague.

Jason Herbert (01:31:38.879)
Anyway, you got force.

Anna Waymack (01:31:40.417)
I'm going to add that Monica Greene is the grand doyen of Black Death Studies and does both the STEM and the history side beautifully. I was actually going to say Carissa Harris, go for her public writing. She has worked on Chaucer and Obscenity, but she has also done a lot of work on Consent. And there are all sorts of ways that...

John Wyatt (01:31:45.323)
Yeah.

Anna Waymack (01:32:06.889)
medievalisms have been cropping up lately, especially in American politics. And Carissa Harris has a fair collection now of publicly available essays that help explain where we're getting certain ideas from ideas about like wenches and sexual availability and who can say no and who can't. So look for her work.

Thomas Lecaque (01:32:31.552)
So when you say medieval, how broadly can I interpret that, Jason?

Jason Herbert (01:32:36.411)
Man, I do fucking American history, dude. I don't give a shit, go for it.

Thomas Lecaque (01:32:39.496)
Oh, can we bring this full circle back to what Anna was commenting? And I'd say the book I'd like to recommend is Sarah Baer's Land of Water, City of the Dead, Religion, and Cahokia's Emergence from the University of Alabama Press, which is in my opinion the single best book on Cahokia, the coolest fucking medieval site I have ever been to. It's just outside of St. Louis. They are currently redoing the Museum and Visitor Center, and I will be driving my kids down there.

Jason Herbert (01:32:47.936)
Oooo

John Wyatt (01:32:49.422)
Hmm.

Thomas Lecaque (01:33:05.716)
day that reopens in the most suburban dad way I possibly fucking can. Medieval is a term that we probably shouldn't apply to the Americas, but I don't get paid enough to come up with better terms and pre-Columbian is also white supremacist bullshit and pre-colonial is also white supremacist bullshit and as long as you know we deal with the fact that medieval is also white supremacist bullshit when you apply it to the Americas, I'm gonna go with it.

Thomas Lecaque (01:33:34.5)
And you should just read it because like rethinking about the world and archaeology and religion and material culture and it's, it's also like 30 bucks in physical form. You should get this book.

Jason Herbert (01:33:34.706)
Listen up.

John Wyatt (01:33:42.498)
You know, I was thinking about this or things like this, sort of in preparation for this podcast, because in the last couple of weeks, very slightly, a little bit, while I was pouring the bourbon. No, but in the last couple of weeks, you've had people talking about the US West, right? And the question you have posed to them is like, what is the US West? How do we identify it? How do we think about where, like, where are the confunds of it?

Jason Herbert (01:33:52.469)
You prepared for this podcast? Okay.

John Wyatt (01:34:12.27)
question that is worth asking about the medieval, right? Like where and what is the medieval and how are we thinking about it and what does it mean?

Anna Waymack (01:34:18.393)
I'm going to say, Thomas, John Wyatt warned you that I will hold stuff over your head forever. John Wyatt, tell me, when do the Middle Ages end?

John Wyatt (01:34:27.522)
Yeah.

John Wyatt (01:34:32.854)
Did they? It may be worth at this point telling people that Anna and I were in grad school together and is the other half of my cohort or I am the other half of hers, however you want to phrase it. So we've been doing this for a while.

Thomas Lecaque (01:34:39.092)
No!

Anna Waymack (01:34:43.342)
I'm gonna be left with a bunch of crap, and the only other thing I can do is just go to bed. I'm gonna be so alone.

John Wyatt (01:34:52.795)
But yeah, when does the Middle Ages end? That's such an interesting question.

Anna Waymack (01:34:58.261)
Are you for the 19-somethings?

John Wyatt (01:35:00.55)
Yeah, I think he probably could. I don't know. I mean, my dissertation runs up to 1938. So, you know, why not? But part of that is because part of that has to do with medievalisms, the way that people are thinking about the medieval past and reinterpreting it and in the 19th century, especially in the early 20th century. In my case, part of it is like this weird little bit of ill history that starts in the 15th century and stays in London, these ill ships until like 1938. Like

Thomas Lecaque (01:35:06.397)
No.

John Wyatt (01:35:28.95)
There's a bit of the medieval past that continues existing as it was in the 15th century, up to World War II. So it's difficult to draw hard and firm lines as much as people want to. And Thomas here is pointing out, are we thinking about medieval as a time period, as a geographic space, as what? When we're thinking about North America in the 13th and 14th centuries, you're thinking

is that medieval? When we're thinking about Oceania in the 15th century, is that medieval? Or are we using the term incorrectly because it's what we got and we're thinking about it like just, oh, it's the time period, so it must be medieval. And that's ignoring all of the meanings that we freight onto the word and the term medieval, right? All of the negativity and all the rest of it.

Thomas Lecaque (01:36:23.648)
Polynesia is definitely medieval in the 15th and 16th century. I go with Maddy Williams' book on this, Polynesia 900 to 1600, which is also a great book.

John Wyatt (01:36:30.824)
That's a great book.

Jason Herbert (01:36:33.545)
I didn't expect Moana to come into this, but okay. All right, let me ask you final question. You guys know this is coming. Is a Knight's Tale a history movie?

Anna Waymack (01:36:44.369)
It's a sports movie! It even has the training montage!

Thomas Lecaque (01:36:47.868)
And consequently, yes, sports are also history.

Jason Herbert (01:36:51.596)
Alright.

Thomas Lecaque (01:36:55.788)
Thanks for watching!

John Wyatt (01:36:56.007)
That's a slippery way out of that.

Thomas Lecaque (01:36:58.52)
I'm gonna pay for that answer. At some point, I'm gonna be at a conference and I'm gonna get picked and it's going to be Anna. I'm not gonna have to turn around. It's gonna be Anna and I'm gonna deserve it. And that's fine.

Jason Herbert (01:37:00.293)
You guys are like dodge I dodge the question

John Wyatt (01:37:02.72)
Yeah.

Anna Waymack (01:37:07.425)
I realize that the podcast can't capture this, but I am making a series of faces here because what the heck?

Thomas Lecaque (01:37:13.696)
Ha ha ha!

John Wyatt (01:37:17.227)
I would say that it is a history movie as much as people are going to listen to this and yell at me about that because of all of the anachronisms and they are manifold and intentional. But it is, as I said earlier, it is set in a very historical space. Its plot is actually driven by a lot of real historical things. And if it is a historical fiction.

Jason Herbert (01:37:28.17)
Right.

John Wyatt (01:37:44.714)
sort of layered on top of that. So yeah, I would say it's a historical movie. I wouldn't use it to teach about the medieval past in terms of like this happened and then this happened and this happened, but in terms of teaching about what the medieval past feels like, yeah, absolutely.

Thomas Lecaque (01:38:06.332)
Mm-hmm. Well, and it'd be better at the beginning of the semester to be like, hey, you have bad ideas about what the Middle Ages were. And you have bad ideas about what the Middle Ages were for pop culture that are historical artifacts of the 21st century, not the Middle Ages. So let's do something from the 21st century before American film decides to go full grimdark. Let's have, so it's both, it's a great history movie for where we are in summer 2001.

John Wyatt (01:38:13.067)
Mm-hmm.

Thomas Lecaque (01:38:35.036)
It's also a great movie if you want to like be like, hey, the middle ages is a real period filled with actual people. And even if the sources we have do the things that like historical sources always do and turn them into caricatures of themselves, they're actual humans with real personalities and loves and hates and like desires and sports and fashion and food and you know, yeah.

Thomas Lecaque (01:38:58.156)
I also really like it.

Jason Herbert (01:38:58.429)
And our final thoughts?

Anna Waymack (01:39:00.397)
I'm just gonna make you all feel old. I was 12 when it came out.

Jason Herbert (01:39:05.037)
It's not the year, Santa, it's the mileage.

Thomas Lecaque (01:39:05.98)
No, I gotta be honest, this is fantastic. I am usually the young person in the room. With these two.

Jason Herbert (01:39:12.213)
Well, John, we're almost always the old one. So, uh.

John Wyatt (01:39:16.991)
I have the hair to prove it too.

Jason Herbert (01:39:19.049)
You know what? We gotta go find David Perry, Matthew Gabriel. They're beyond us in age. So we'll bring them back up when we do the Robin Hood bracket for March Madness and so forth. All right, guys. This has been fun. I've been looking forward to this podcast quite literally for months. We've been watching, waiting, waiting to do this when we want to give some space and some time.

John Wyatt (01:39:22.454)
Yeah, they're older. Yep.

Anna Waymack (01:39:34.897)
Thank you.

Jason Herbert (01:39:46.037)
And I'm so glad we could do this. So thank you guys so very much. And I think all I have to tell you is good night.

Thomas Lecaque (01:39:55.869)
I'll laugh at that.

John Wyatt (01:39:56.159)
Haaaaaaa

Thomas Lecaque (01:39:58.924)
Thank you guys.

Jason Herbert (01:39:59.324)
My dad jokes for me. I do try. Alright, hold on.

John Wyatt (01:39:59.562)
We like you anyway, Jason.

Jason Herbert (01:40:07.13)
All right.