Weirdhouse Cinema: Quest (1984)

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the 1984 Saul and Elaine Bass short film "Quest," a visionary take on human mortality, written by Ray Bradbury. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
And this is Joe McCormick.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
And today's episode feels like a perfect fit in a
number of ways. For starters. We've been discussing mystery cults
on our core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
and the concept of an imagistic religion has been key
to our discussions. There infrequent high sensory rights of passage,
and I feel like today's film matches up with that

(00:37):
concept on a couple of levels. Furthermore, to understand, we
potentially have more eyes on the podcast feed this week,
and it seemed proper to maybe lean a little more
into science fiction. Plus, we've also been saving this one
for a week when we had maybe a little less time.
This is one of the shorter pictures we've looked at
on Weird House Cinema. It's only a half hour long,

(01:00):
but that's fitting given the subject matter, and boy does
it pack a lot.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
In So what's the movie?

Speaker 2 (01:05):
The movie is the nineteen eighty four short film Quest.
I note that I am going to mistakenly refer to
this film as Conquest at least once during the course
of this podcast. But not to be confused with Luccio
Fulci's Conquest. This is Quest. It is adapted for the
screen written by Ray Bradbury, and it is directed by

(01:28):
Saul and Elaine Bass.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
Now this is not our first Bass film. We talked
about Saul and Elaine Bass when we covered the movie
Phase four, which was about super intelligent ants. That was
a very interesting movie. But one thing I remember thinking
about it was that it felt somewhat constrained by realism
for most of its run time, except in like the

(01:51):
very last couple of minutes where it got super weird,
and it almost felt like, you know, that level of
weirdness was being held back for much of the run time.
I think that is not something you could say about Quest.

Speaker 4 (02:05):
Now.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
This film is all abstract and surreal weirdness. It is
not held back by the necessities of for the most part,
the necessities of genre or plot or character, or any
of the conventional trappings of narrative filmmaking. It is instead
more like an initiation into a great mystery.

Speaker 3 (02:27):
That's right. I mean, its plot is very basic. It
is essentially a there's a premise which We'll explain more
as we go on, but it essentially has to do
with characters whose life spans are unnaturally short. And then
from that premise, there is a character who must make
a journey through a difficult sort of hero's journey in
order to cure the people of this condition of having

(02:49):
shortened life spans.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
Yes, yes, we have a chosen one, we have a quest,
and yeah, it's quite an adventure.

Speaker 3 (02:57):
But so with the plot itself being quite simple, what
is left to fill in the kind of uniqueness of
the movie is the series of images that it supplies.
This is a movie that is about creating weird scenes,
and I really like the the variable tone of of
the the sort of settings that we get. Because there

(03:20):
were sort of natural settings. We see our hero wandering
through rocky landscapes and you know, mountain mountain passes and
planes and things like that. But then also we get
not even artificial but almost geometric, like abstract landscapes that
couldn't really exist in reality. They're they're like illustrations from

(03:41):
an mc escher drawing.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
Yeah, yeah, increasingly surreal landscapes and environments. You know, you
go from from some settings that have like a very
like dark fantasy, Sword and Sandals kind of feel into
settings that feel like they have apps been stripped from
tron somehow.

Speaker 3 (04:02):
Yes, yes, it starts a tour and ends esher.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
Yeah all right, my elevator pitch for this one, I
just dug up a quick Bible verse, teach us to
number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Speaker 4 (04:16):
Ah.

Speaker 3 (04:16):
Yeah, that'll come up later.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
Now. As for the trailer for this one, there's seemingly
no true trailer for this film, which isn't surprising, as
we'll get into some of the reasons here. It only
played in festival competitions and never received a theatrical release.
But maybe we can just have a brief audio sample
of JJ's choosing here.

Speaker 4 (04:42):
Is this the one?

Speaker 5 (04:47):
One day from now, you'll be a grown boy, two
or three, young man, five, middle aves seven old. In
eight days, you'll stop and die.

Speaker 4 (05:09):
Listen to our heart's race. Listen to your own heart race.

Speaker 5 (05:19):
We are locked away in the world where our lives
speaks through time. In eight days, no time to see you,
to feel, to know.

Speaker 4 (05:28):
It's time. Ah, Now the teaching begins.

Speaker 5 (05:51):
Listen to them, learn quickly, listen to.

Speaker 2 (05:54):
Them all right now? If you want to watch Quest
from nineteen eighty four before proceeding here. Well, DVD and
VHS releases have apparently been available. There's some evidence I've

(06:16):
found that you can order some sort of a DVD
of this movie, but for the most part, I can't
tell that it has benefited from a high quality physical
media release, at least not yet. Hopefully there's some sort
of collected short films of Saul in the Lane Bass
disc that will come out in the future, and when
it does, we will certainly promote it here on Weird

(06:38):
House Cinema. As of right now, you can easily find
this film on YouTube. There's at least one version that
claims to be some level of remastering. I'm never sure
how that works when you have a unofficial remastering of films,
so I'm not completely certain on that. I think that
Eternal Family, which you can find an Eternal dot TV,

(07:02):
I believe they have offered it in the past, but
I'm not sure that it is currently offered, but check
out Eternal Family either way, their catalog often matches up
with Weird House Cinema tastes. But I'm confident that if
you were interested in watching Quest, out there, you can
find a stream of it somewhere, and then hopefully down
the road we'll get that high quality release that we

(07:24):
all clearly need.

Speaker 3 (07:25):
All right, Should we talk about the connections?

Speaker 2 (07:28):
Yeah, let's start at the top with the directors and producers.
It's Saul and Elaine Bass, husband and wife design power couple.
We discussed saw Bass previously in our episode on nineteen
seventy four's Phase four. That was his only his slash there.
I may go back and forth from referring to him

(07:49):
and referring to he and his wife. They work together,
I believe on most of these projects after a certain point,
but she wasn't always credited right at there at the top.
On Quest they are co directors and are credited as such.
But yeah, Phase four was their only feature length directorial credit.

(08:10):
A film that, yeah, we might describe as the two
thousand and one a space odyssey of ant movies, an
increasingly weird man versus Nature film that reaches a fever
pitch of an ending and its theatrical cut, but absolutely
explodes in a cinematic acid trip if you watch the
original ending, which is even weirder and stranger.

Speaker 3 (08:32):
Yeah, the spoiler for this movie is that humanity is
sort of being, would you say, competed with by hyper
intelligent ants, and the ants win in the end, and
when the ants, when there's an ending where it's I recall,
it's sort of implied that humans aren't all just like
killed by the ants. Like life goes on, but life

(08:54):
is increasingly completely incomprehensible because we are unable to understand
the intelligence or desire or what is meaningful to the
ant powers that are governing our lives.

Speaker 2 (09:07):
Yeah, it's kind of unclear if it's a downer ending
or a happy ending, because it's that surreal and out there,
like it's beyond your human expectations of good and bad endings.

Speaker 3 (09:18):
You cannot imagine an ant ruled world. You just can't
even get there now.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
Saalbass lived nineteen twenty through nineteen ninety six. Elaine Bass
was born in nineteen twenty seven, and as of this
recording is still around now. We talked a bit about
sal Bass on our episode regarding Phase four again. He
was the title sequence slash title design guy of his era.

(09:45):
A Bass title sequence is often credited as a perfect
condensation of the feel of a picture, just taking the
whole vibe of that picture and condensing it down to
just a mere couple of minutes. So you'll hear a
lot of filmmakers, even contemporary filmmakers, just talk about his
mastery of this. He crafted title sequences for major films

(10:07):
from the mid fifties all the way through the mid nineties.
We're talking about the likes of the Seven Year Itch, Vertigo, Psycho, Spartacus,
West Side Story, Seconds, which we covered on Weird House Cinema,
Broadcast News, Big Goodfellas, Kate Beer, and Casino. The credits
to Mad Men on TV this was an homage to

(10:29):
his work. He did logos for a number of big
name companies throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and he
also did some pretty famous movie posters as well, including
the aforementioned films as well as Stanley Kubrick's The Shining
I consulted a book for a little more detail about
Saul and the Lame Bass, a book titled saw Baths,
Anatomy of Film Design by Jan Christopher Horrock, which of

(10:53):
course has a great deal to say about their approach
to art, everything from title and logo design work to
of course their cinematic output. And again from about nineteen
sixty onward. Elaine was his longtime creative partner who worked
with him on pretty much most of these projects, so

(11:14):
she's not again. She's not always credited earlier on, but
certainly by the time of today's film, she shared official
credit with her husband. Their first short film was nineteen
sixty four. Is the Searching Eye, a contemplation of visual
awareness in the unseen world. This one was narrated by
Vic Perrin, who recently talked about the Voice of the

(11:36):
Outer Limits and also the Gargoyle.

Speaker 3 (11:39):
The narrator at the beginning of Gargoyles and dubbed in
on Bernie Casey's Gargoyle King.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
Yes, The Searching Eye was followed by From Here to
There the same year, and Why Man Creates in nineteen
sixty eight, a meditation on creativity and nature. Did won
an Oscar the following year for Best Documentary Short Subjects,
and this paved the way for Phase four, which we've
previously talked about. Two other short films followed, seventy eight's

(12:08):
Notes on the Popular Arts and nineteen eighties The Solar
Film that was an OSCAR nominated documentary produced by Robert Redford.
About the perils of fossil fuels and the need for
humanity to pivot to clean solar energy, and all of
this leads up to their final film project, and that
is nineteen eighty four's Quest. As Horrick relates, the origin

(12:31):
story on this one is super interesting. So bear with
me here. This is a lot. I was not expecting
it to be this rich. So this was a Japanese
funded production funded by the Church of World Messianity, a
new religious movement founded in nineteen thirty five by Mokichio

(12:51):
Kata who lived eighteen eighty two through nineteen fifty five.
A religious movement that promotes spiritual cleansing via the light.

Speaker 3 (13:01):
WHOA, I did not expect it to take this turn.

Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yeah, so apparently, as I understand it based on reading
Horrock's book, here people affiliated with the church at this point.
I think the Church was kind of going through like
some you know, rebranding a little bit redesign, like entering
a new era, and they were really taken by the
Bass's design work. This work had recently been featured in
a nineteen seventy nine issue of Idea, and so they

(13:28):
approached him about creating a visionary film to play in
the church's temples and spaces. So Saul Bass apparently wasn't
really all that interested in creating an overtly religious work,
but was drawn to the idea of quote a purely
metaphoric vision without proselytizing for the church, and quote, a
positive film that doesn't view life as a prelude to disaster.

Speaker 3 (13:52):
Okay, so the Basses and the funders here may have
had totally different visions about what made this project appealing,
but nevertheless they could both get what they wanted out
of it.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
That does seem to be the amazing thing about it,
because they did reach an agreement here. So I think
basically Saul Bass had worked with some big corporations before
funding his other works and was able to keep a
great deal of creative freedom over the final product. And

(14:24):
he thought, really, I mean, it seemed like it would
be kind of almost naive to think this, but he thought, well,
we can do the same thing working with a religious organization.
But he was right that it seems like it basically
worked out like that.

Speaker 3 (14:37):
It's like when the Baptist Church of la funded Plan
nine from Outer Space.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
Yeah, pretty much. So, yeah, they funded this for the
tune of I Believe a Million dollars was the overall budget,
and again this was back in the eighties, and it
does feature strong themes of light, which line up with
some of the doctrines the land stand them of the
church in question here, but otherwise the plot the finished

(15:06):
film is detached from the church's teaching, so again kind
of a secularization of maybe some of their core values,
but in a way that doesn't lean too heavily into
preaching the gospel of this particular faith.

Speaker 3 (15:20):
Kind of like if you could get a I don't know,
just some mainstream Christian church to sponsor you by creating
a story about sacrifice and redemption that didn't have any
overtly Christian terms or ideas in it apart from the themes.

Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah, yeah. So the film never received a theatrical release
in the United States, but it did play at plenty
of festivals, winning at least one award. It attracted a
number of fans, including George Lucas, which is not surprising.
Lucas praised its effects, its music, and its use of
the hero's journey. Meanwhile, back in Japan, it played eight

(15:56):
times a day at the church's headquarters for a period
of four years.

Speaker 3 (16:01):
Wow, does that beat Rocky Horror for the longest theatrical
run just in terms of total number of plays?

Speaker 2 (16:09):
I don't know. I mean, that would be an interesting
question to actually get into. Because, of course, at the
Studio ghibli Museum in Tokyo they play various short films
of Miyazaki's exclusively there. It's the only place you can
see most of them outside of maybe catching them at
a festival or a special showing. But that being said,

(16:31):
I don't think they're playing the same film every day,
four times a day. So, but then again, this is
only a period of four years, so I don't know
how many total viewings they were able to chalk up
during that time. There was a read in Horror's book,
though there was apparently some concern on the Japanese side
here that if the film were commercialized too much, it
would cause political problems for the church, which allegedly this

(16:55):
allegedly stifled some of its reach, So there may there
might have been some tension over that fact. But still
it did play in festivals, people did get to see it,
people continue to see it, and again, hopefully we'll get
to see some sort of proper release of it in
the future.

Speaker 3 (17:11):
Wow, that's really interesting.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
So they agreed to the basic terms of this film,
but then they still needed somebody to write it, so
they reached out to legendary author Ray Bradbury, who lived
nineteen twenty through twenty twelve, the author of such famous
works as The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit four fifty one, The
Illustrated Man, The October Country, and so forth. He was

(17:35):
also a successful screenwriter in his own right, having written
the screenplay for the nineteen fifty six adaptation of Moby Dick,
and his work was also adapted for TV and film
going back to the nineteen fifties, including Jack Arnold's It
Came from Outer Space in fifty three, which we may
come back to in Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (17:52):
You know, this makes me think I've never seen a
film adaptation of Moby Dick, and I'd be very curious
how they do it, because that's one of my favorite
novels and it doesn't seem like it would adapt to
the screen very well. So much of it is just
in the you know, it's in the weirdness of the narrator.
It's in like the kind of essays about seatology and

(18:12):
things like that. It seems like it would be hard
to turn into a movie, but I don't know, Maybe
they do a good job.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
I mean, I haven't seen it since I was a kid,
but I remember really enjoying Gregory Peck in the adaptation
from fifty six. And since Ray Bradbury did the screenplay,
maybe we can do it on weird house cinema. That's enough.
It's basically sci fi, so yeah, Saul and Elaine Bass
reached out to Bradbury to script Quest, and Bradbury adapted
his own nineteen forty six story, Frost and Fire. Now,

(18:42):
there were a number of changes made, apparently here, as
Bradbury updated the structure of that old story for this
new project. So first of all, Saul was wary of
overreaching with their budget and requested that it be set
on Earth, or at least an earth like world, rather
than an overly alien planet. That seems like a reasonable

(19:03):
budgetary request, though having seen the full film, I feel
like we get very unearthly.

Speaker 4 (19:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:10):
Yeah, at least half of it's taken place in you know,
geometry textbook illustrations, not on any landscape I would recognize.

Speaker 2 (19:18):
Right, So I don't feel like they really held back
too much there. Also, while the original story is more
hard science fiction, in the original story of the characters
depleted life spans are apparently due to radiation, and they're
able to depend on some sort of race memory. They
have to convey the essentials of the quest, as we'll

(19:39):
get into to each subsequent generation, Whereas the version of
the story that we get in the Quest has a
more mythic vibe to it. It feels more like fantasy
or sword and Sandals, but then gets increasingly stranger and
more surreal.

Speaker 3 (19:55):
Yeah, that's funny. I seem to recall in the past
at some point Bradbury making some kind of derisive comments
about science fiction and saying that he preferred to write
fantasy because that was, like, I don't know, he thought
it was like less bound by realism or something. Maybe
I'm misremembering that.

Speaker 2 (20:13):
That way, they would kind of match up with what
we see here, Like you can well imagine Bradbury seeing
this as the opportunity to take what interests him the
most about that old story that was written, you know
very much for the sci fi publications of the day,
taking the essence of that and updating it and making
it more mythic, freeing it from the shackles of the

(20:34):
science fiction. Perhaps because clearly caveat, I have not read
the original Bradbury story, but I get a strong hint
here that Bradbury wasn't really interested in the effects of
radiation human beings. It's more about issues of mortality and
you know, cross generational efforts and so forth. Now, as

(20:57):
for the human cast of Quest, there are a bunch
of people in this and everyone is just bolk credited
at the end. They don't specify who plays who, and
it leaves the task to your humble podcasters to try
and figure out exactly who's who in this picture. We
are not going to single out everyone, but I do
want to mention just a few of the players here

(21:19):
who are notable because of their work elsewhere, and my
apologies to anyone that I did leave out because of this.
Multiple actors, for instance, play are chosen one our hero
of the tale, because he's going to start We cover
most of his life over the course of the narrative.
He begins as a baby and we'll end with him

(21:40):
as a mature adult man. But we have different actors
playing him, and it's not a makeup effect.

Speaker 3 (21:47):
That would have been a good choice though, if you
had a baby the whole time with just makeup and
the older.

Speaker 2 (21:53):
Yeah, or win in both directions. You know, have like
a twenty five year old actor and then age him
and dage him all the way down to baby. All right.
One of the early characters we encounter in this is
an unnamed character that I thought of as the Elder,
some sort of a wise older individual who is looking

(22:16):
for the chosen one and finds the chosen one.

Speaker 3 (22:20):
And this the monklike guy who does the palm reading
on the baby at the beginning. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:25):
This character is played by John Abbott, who lived nineteen
oh five through nineteen ninety six, an English Shakespearean actor
with very expressive eyes, known for roles and let's say
nineteen forty eight's The Woman in White. He had an
appearance on the original Star Trek, the original Lost in Space,
and his other credits, of which he has a lot,
include nineteen forty four Is The Mask of Demetrios. This

(22:49):
is one I've looked at before because it's a Peter
Lorrie movie. He's also in Cry of the were Wolf
from the same year, and he was the voice of
Akella the Wolf in Dizzy Needs the Jungle Book back
in nineteen sixty seven. All right, again, multiple actors play
the chosen one, our hero, but at one point the
hero is played by Noah Hathaway born nineteen seventy one. Fittingly,

(23:13):
this is, of course, the actor who also played a
Treyu in nineteen eighty four. Is the never ending story
which we covered on a previous episode of Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (23:21):
I thought he looked familiar. Yeah, is this the day too, boy?

Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yeah, this is the boy that I believe begins the journey. Right,
He's passed his tests and is then setting out on
the journey.

Speaker 3 (23:35):
He graduated at Harvard College j L where he got
an A and then he gets to go out on
the journey.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
Now, another actor that shows up in this is Bill Irwin.
I think he plays an old man that is encountered
late in the picture. That is another monk like figure.

Speaker 3 (23:50):
Oh, the hooded guy at the Egyptian temple.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
Yeah, yeah, I believe this is Bill Irwin. I could
be wrong on this. Bill Irwin of nineteen fourteen through
twenty ten an American character actor who appeared in more
than two hundred and fifty television and film roles, including
the one that earned him an Emmy nomination in nineteen
ninety three. Retiree Sid Fields on the sitcom Seinfeld.

Speaker 3 (24:14):
You know, I wonder with actors like this, who are
they're the character actor who just always plays a cantankerous
old man. What did he do before he was old?

Speaker 2 (24:24):
Just always old?

Speaker 3 (24:25):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (24:26):
Yeah, it's like William Hickey late in life, you played
cantankerous old men, and also early in his career. So
all right. The music in this film is also a
real delight. It's you'll have Maybe you can explain the
music and the sound of this film better than I can, Joe,

(24:46):
But I just think of it as a soothing, other
worldly cascade of electronic bliss and intrigue.

Speaker 3 (24:53):
Oh yeah, yeah, just whipped butter. Synthesizer auras a really
good stuff, a lot of great you know contrast along
the dynamic range. So there's a lot of synth bass
that sends to me might be like a mog Taurus
or something, you know, the strong, pulsing based tones, and

(25:14):
then like synthesizer flutes that I don't know if you
really get that sound much anymore. It was a big
thing in the eighties where you would you would evoke
a sense of mysticism by having a synthesizer flute that
I feel like if you were composing a track now
and you went to put in that same synth flute voicing,
it would sound really tinny and hokey to you, so

(25:37):
you would use something else. But if you go back
to these compositions that feature it, it's actually great.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
Yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about here,
and I think that the music it has this kind
So again, we have this purifying light that is important
to the faith that funded this picture. And then also
there's a kind of purifying light that is key to
the plot of our story, and the music feels like

(26:05):
a fitting sonic incarnation of that light.

Speaker 3 (26:10):
I see what you're saying. Yeah, the music shimmers a lot.
It often expands to fit. You know, It'll be very
quiet at first, and then as the light floods into
the scene, the music floods onto the soundtrack, and yeah,
it's it's a good use of sonic textures.

Speaker 2 (26:26):
So the people behind the music here, well, Elaine Bass
is credited on the music. She was of not a
professional singer, with some musical training prior to her design career.
But then also we have credited Barrington Van Campen who
I looked him up. I can find a birthday for him.
But he is apparently still active on the San Francisco

(26:47):
music scene. If you look up, if you go to
the dbduo dot com, this is the website for Van
Campen and Dale LeDuc. They haven't a stick act together,
and there's a They also have some some some some
brief bio information about Van Campen. Van Campen is a

(27:08):
multi instrumentalist. His instruments include the melotron and various synthesizers.
Uh and there's a lot of like session work and
production work in his background as well.

Speaker 3 (27:19):
I just looked at Wait No l a Beatles tribute band.

Speaker 2 (27:23):
Yeah yeah, at one point, Uh yeah, I think, I think,
and I think they still do a lot of covers
of Beatles songs. I was looking at. They're still doing gigs.
If you're in in San Francisco, you can go out
and catch these guys. Tell them we sent you.

Speaker 3 (27:37):
Please request a Beatles tune and then request the theme
from Quest Now.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
Prior to this film, Van Campen had worked as a
musician on the Jerry Lewis film Slapstick of Another Kind,
adapted from the work of Kurt Vonnegut and also co
starring John Abbott, but Quest was seemingly his first credited
film or TV composition. UH followed in nineteen eighty eight
with a score for the film In Dangerous Company. He's

(28:05):
also credited as composer on Faces of Death Volumes four
and six in nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety six. I
have not and we'll never see the Faces of Death.
My window for having watched Faces of Death has long passed.
But he did some sort of work on there, and
he also did a lot of work with you know,
such clients as AT and T, various TV channels and

(28:26):
film studios. So I know, I just think he did
a lot of a lot of a lot of like
mercenary sound work, you know. And so I don't want
to I don't want to single him out for Faces
of Death. Somebody had to do the music for Faces
of Death might as well have been this guy.

Speaker 3 (28:40):
They could have also just sourced pre existing composition.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
That's true. That's true. That's very possible. And I don't
know the full story on his involvement in Faces of death.
So don't don't put any of that on him, because again,
at the end of the day, the music in Quest
is amazing and I loved every minute of it.

Speaker 3 (29:05):
Okay, you want to talk about the plot, Oh, let's
experience it all right. So when we first come up
and get our title sequence, the camera seems to be
navigating a cave or a megalithic structure of some kind. Cold,
dark stone walls. We've got shadows cut by shafts of light.
Everything's kind of green and gray in color. There is

(29:28):
a generally pale, cold kind of color scheme that defines
most of the movie until the last couple minutes. It's greens, blues, whites,
and grays. And when we first come in, also there's fog.
The air is thick with fog. It's kind of swirling
and suggesting a dark age in a way. And then
there's a voiceover that says, before the gate was closed

(29:51):
and the light began to fail, the ancients lived a
long and fruitful life. Now our lifespan.

Speaker 4 (29:58):
Is eight days.

Speaker 3 (30:00):
Yes, for us, there is no time. The minutes, the hours,
and the days fly away, and our lives along with them.
And so all of this is being said is the
camera is panning and traveling through these caverns and stone corridors,
and then there's a thing that I liked that struck
me as a kind of scale twist. So the cameras

(30:22):
it's going through these stone caverns, and I had been
assuming the spaces we were looking at were supposed to
be roughly like human hall sized, with the camera at
normal eye level for a person. But then suddenly we
zoom in on a little crevice in a stone facade
that looks like it's the size of a mousehole. But
then you realize there are tiny stairs leading up to

(30:44):
the crevice, and then you see a human form standing
inside the doorway, and it becomes clear we're either looking
at like a two inch tall human or the original
reference scale you had in mind was wrong, And I
think it's the latter, though there will be similar kind
of scale versions that happen later in the story as well.

Speaker 4 (31:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:03):
Yeah, to just a certain degree, it's like this is
a an artifact of how the techniques they use to
shoot it, but also it feels fittingly surreal in this
picture as well.

Speaker 3 (31:14):
Yeah. So from here we move into the cavern and
come upon a group of people who are dressed in
plain peasant clothing. There is again going along with the
kind of dark age feeling. There is a since when
we come to these people that they are living abject
lives of kind of darkness and ignorance and want. But

(31:38):
the first thing we get to with these people is
a scene of childbirth there. So there are all these
people in peasant clothing assisting a woman in childbirth. The
baby is born, and a man in a sort of
monastic beard holds the child up to this audience of
elders some kind of counsel and they're asking is this
the one? And a debate starts. The elder say it's

(32:00):
too early to tell, and then another says, no, we
cannot wait, we must chance it. And so they check
the infant's hand. They have this monk like man look
at the hand, and the baby's palm opens and yes,
we see some crinkles there, but I think they're actually
doing a palm reading. The monk like man says, yes,
the line is strong. I think talking about the lifeline.

Speaker 2 (32:21):
Now. I love the way that the plight of the
people here is presented because it's one of those things
where on one level, yes, it's fantastic, But on the
other it's like, yeah, that's how our subjective experience of
time sometimes goes. It feels like it is flowing faster
than it should and we have no time, or we
have far less time than we wanted. And at the

(32:42):
same time, given the sort of again you said, like
the dark age vibe we have here, this kind of
archaic vibe. I'm also reminded of things we've discussed on
stuff to blow your mind in the past about various
historian historians an anthrop anthropologists reflecting on what life was
like for our ancestors before people were able to specialize more,

(33:05):
before various cultural and technological advancements opened up more time
in people's days to allow different types of experiences and
different types of knowledge to accumulate.

Speaker 3 (33:19):
Yeah, that is interesting, and and that kind of desperation
about the time. The sense of I want more life
is a fantastic premise to start with, for one thing,
because it's not a you know, it's it's a very
relatable feeling but accelerated for the purpose of the narrative.
And it's also something it's like an unpersonified villain. It's

(33:41):
not it's not a beast you can fight, though there
will be some beasts to fight in the story. It's
just like we we we can't accept the way time
flows around us, or the way our bodies flow through time.
It's it's it's a terror to us.

Speaker 2 (33:57):
Yeah, And it's one of the things that makes it
fitting that this film is thirty minutes long and not
an hour or an hour and a half or two hours,
And it is a film where there there is no
true personified villain, if there is any. There are adversaries
to overcome, but there's also a case to be made
that all of those adversaries are perhaps aspects of the self,

(34:19):
you know. So that's yeah again. The film itself has
a great mythic vibe. It feels like an initiation into
some great secret.

Speaker 3 (34:30):
So they go on to observe that the child is
already seeing and hearing them. That's pretty quick, and the
elders all seem to agree, Okay, the teaching must begin
at once. So the child is carried out of the
room where he was born. How are you going to
start teaching a baby that was born two minutes ago?
That I think that baby is not ready for school,
But they disagree, so here we go, it says day one,

(34:53):
and the elders move down a shadowy corridor, carrying the
baby with them. The narrator says, as we watch you
grow and change, as you watch us we grow old,
Your life, like ours, is destined to be short. In
eight days we're born, we mature, and we grow old
and die. And then the monk like man and the
others bring the baby to what looked to me kind

(35:16):
of like a shop counter in a fantasy game general store,
but this is, I think, actually supposed to be a school.
So they tell the baby one day from now, you
will be a grown boy, two or three, a young man, five,
middle aged, seven old. In eight days you will die.

Speaker 4 (35:35):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (35:36):
And then there's a strange moment where the man says,
listen to our heart's race, and one of the elders
holds the baby against her chest, and then they say,
listen to your own heart race. And this, like accelerated
heart rate, is a thing that comes back in the story,
but it does just remind me of like, you know,

(35:56):
putting my ear to the hearts of pets and hearing
their faster little heartbeats. You know, there's small bodies and
little metabolisms.

Speaker 2 (36:04):
Yeah yeah, and it also will have another example of
this as well. But it kind of ties into this
idea that there is there is a cross generational, a
cross generation connection between the individuals of the in this
culture of these people that is maybe a bit surreal

(36:25):
as well. That's maybe leaning a little bit into the fantastic,
and it's not entirely based on real world human teaching
and conveying of information.

Speaker 3 (36:36):
Yeah. So the old man says, we are locked away
in a world where our lives speed through time in
eight days, no time to see, to feel, to know,
And then he just says, okay, it's time, and the
baby is handed across the counter to the ShopKeep. But again,
this is actually some kind of school. So they take

(36:56):
the baby away, and the old man sort of calls
after the baby's now the teaching begins. Learn quickly, little one,
uh and ooh. The some kind of learning with blocks
is going on. There's a lot of cool stuff in
this teaching montage. I like that we start with these
little stone coins and there are squares and pyramids. It

(37:17):
looks like stuff that would be fun to handle in
the same way that D and D dice are.

Speaker 2 (37:21):
Yeah, yeah, it's all very cactile. And yeah, I just
love this montage because everything is very identifiable as teaching
and principle on one level, but also feels very alien
and also perhaps concerning a natural philosophy unknown to our world.

Speaker 4 (37:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:39):
Again, it's worth noting in the original Ray Bradbury story
that the short lived humans in it have a form
of race memory that they're able to depend upon to
pass knowledge down from short lived generation to short lived generation.
And that's not what we see here, but we might
think of this along similar lines. Information is perhaps being

(37:59):
trans from teachers to student, yes, with physical manipulation of
objects and some external learning devices, but also perhaps in
a way that depends on something greater than human learning,
and it maybe there is some sort of psychic connection.
And in fact, later on, when we when our hero
has commenced on his journey and he hears the voices

(38:22):
of his teachers, I mean, perhaps that is like a
psychic echo of what has occurred previously.

Speaker 3 (38:29):
Yeah, yeah, I like that too. It invites questions of like,
is there actual telepathy going on or the or the
teachers currently communicating with him as he as he goes beyond,
or is it like now now part of them is
in him and he just carries it with them.

Speaker 2 (38:45):
Yeah, yeah, and this is a great film. And then
it leaves you to ask those questions and they're ultimately unanswerable.
It's all up to your interpretation.

Speaker 3 (38:52):
So already we see the child as a toddler, sorting
these little shapes and blocks as the teachers look on.
I love the way the blocks look. They're made of
a kind of polished stone with a freckled and scarred appearance,
and the child is learning to line them up in
a special order, as if he were spelling words with

(39:13):
the blocks. But what does it mean.

Speaker 4 (39:14):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (39:15):
We're not told. There's also a metal block set with
a hollow cube that you balance on a prismatic pillar,
and then you start kind of like piecing them together
like an erector set. We see the child working with
these elements blindfolded, also doing some kind of psychic paddy
cake game with his hands, like the part across from
his teachers where they're like moving their hands and then

(39:36):
slapping them together. I didn't get exactly what that was,
but it seemed to me it involved maybe a kind
of sense of psychic powers or premonitions about where the
hands were going. We also see the training getting into
He's like reading patterns of grain in blocks of wood.
I liked that it was strange, and then making spears

(39:58):
out of a kind of silvery So the spears are
modular and they snap together like tent poles, and then
they have these fins and barbs that snap out from
the poles and he's throwing the spears doing target practice
with them. There's another part where he unveils a shimmering
steel cone from a covering which is a metal box,

(40:19):
and the cone emits blinding light, and then he lifts
up the cone and that unveils another level. It is
like a blue glowing ball of energy that's inside the cone,
and the ball of energy just floats in the air. Again,
we're not told what that is. But anyway, when the
training is complete, the boy now looks about ten or
twelve years old, and an old man tells him it's

(40:41):
time for you to go.

Speaker 2 (40:43):
Yeah. It's like you know in elementary school when you
make it halfway through learning about the Civil War and
then they're like, I'm sorry, now I have to send
you home for summer.

Speaker 4 (40:51):
That's it.

Speaker 2 (40:52):
That's all we had time for.

Speaker 3 (40:53):
Yeah, I do remember that about a lot of lesson
plans when I was younger, A fantastic lack of clothes
about me. Things we learned. Okay, So the old man
comes to the boy to tell him more about his mission.
They're looking at a light pouring out from between some rocks,
and the man says, that light squeezes through the crack
where the doors in the Great Gate join. That gate

(41:15):
must be opened. You will open it.

Speaker 2 (41:18):
Yeah, and again this possibly lines up with this idea
of I believe it is that the Joe rai or
jewelry purifying light that factors into the teachings of Okichi
Okata often described as kind of like an energy healing
doctrine hm. Okay, And I've also read that it sometimes
involves like the use of some sort of reflective medallion,

(41:40):
which we also see a version of in this picture.

Speaker 3 (41:42):
Oh interesting, Okay, I was wondering about that. Okay, So
maybe they did get a few little like specific things
in there.

Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (41:50):
Anyway, the old man says, beyond the gate is a
land where life is lived for twenty thousand days and more.
If the gate can be reached and opened, the light
will rush out us and with it bring long life
and peace. The boy asks why he has been chosen,
and the old man explains, those who were sent before
are left when they were too old, they left too late,

(42:12):
and they died before they reached the gate. This time,
they selected the boy to be sent when he was
very young, so he would have enough time to complete
his mission. And then the old man says, you've learned.
You've learned your lessons quickly. You're strong and intelligent, you
have curiosity. And the boy says, but have I learned enough?
And the old man does not answer the question. He

(42:33):
just says, we don't have time to teach you anymore.
You'll have to learn the rest on your way.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
Yeah, and it really is like that. I mean that again.
That's one of the great things about this film. I
say it in Jess. But it's also like that's the
way of life, and it encapsulates that perfectly.

Speaker 3 (42:48):
Yeah, have we ever learned enough in childhood to prepare
us for adult life? Probably not, or can't really answer
that question, but you don't really have a choice no
more time.

Speaker 2 (42:58):
Here's your silvery space. Go out and do your best.

Speaker 3 (43:11):
So the boy is outfitted with again those gleaming spears
and other supplies. We see them like kind of pouring
out these measures of grain and stuff for him. And
before he's sent out by the elders, the old man
gives him this small, like mirror polished metal pendant to
hang around his neck, which may be connecting to that
actual religious item used by the whatever, I forget what

(43:35):
it's called, the Church of Messianity. Yeah, And then so
he takes the pendant, and then he turns to his
mother and they embrace, and all she says is goodbye.

Speaker 4 (43:45):
Then he goes.

Speaker 3 (43:47):
So the boy sets out into the world. And now, oh,
and this is by the way, we get a title
that says day two. So day two of his life.
The boy sets out into the world, and now instead
of just the dark caverns, there are landscapes. First, we
see the boy crossing a kind of bleak tundra with
these sandy hills, fields of snow, expanses of gray water,

(44:08):
and mountains in the background. At one point we see
him wandering through bad lands full of smooth, jumbled rock
formations that look like giant piles of bones. And as
the boy travels on through the rocks, he hears voices
whispering in his head. This is what we were talking
about earlier, the voices of his teachers and the elders,
and they're saying things like, go on, don't hesitate, we

(44:30):
have prepared you well, be brave, don't worry. And the
boy wanders in darkness through dis maze of stones, hearing
the weird voices, and then suddenly hearing a kind of
hooting in the distance, and he draws his spear in preparation.

Speaker 4 (44:44):
What is it?

Speaker 3 (44:45):
What's making this sound? And there's a stillness, feathers fall
on the rocks around him, and then a monster attacks.

Speaker 2 (44:53):
Yeah, and it's a pretty cool monster.

Speaker 3 (44:54):
I have to say, that's right. So the monster, whatever
it is, first thrashes around in the darkness, roaring the boy.
The boy holds out his spear, and then they eventually
clash and we see some elements of the monster. It
appears to be a kind of giant reptilian pit bull
head with a triangular or circular triangular mouth with teeth
jutting in from all sides. I gotta say that the

(45:17):
head is a little bit rancori ish.

Speaker 2 (45:20):
Yeah, yeah, there's definitely kind of a rain corps vibe.
I also feel like it's maybe a combination of some
sort of a giant sloth and a tartar grade, which
would of course be a giant, a very giant tartar grade.

Speaker 3 (45:31):
It's actually also, in fact, to draw on two different
return of the Jedi. It's a little bit Rancor and
a little bit Sarlac because of the circular mouth with
the teeth coming in in all directions. Anyway, the boy
fights the monster in the dark with his spear, and
eventually he slays it, and as the beast lies dying
on the ground, he approaches it and there's a kind
of sadness in its eyes. And then the next thing.

(45:55):
This was one of the few parts where I feel
like I wasn't sure I was understanding what the film
was trying to suggest. There's like, after he's already slayed
the monster, there's a screeching in the night, and some
other creature seems to be circling the boy and he
raises a rock above his head and he shouts no,
and then the threat seems to fade away.

Speaker 2 (46:16):
Yeah, this was interesting. I guess I'm on a literal
interpretation level. I was thinking, Okay, maybe he's just scaring
away additional monsters. You know, there are others out there,
and he's saying he's just keeping them from attacking. Or
you know, perhaps it's something more, and maybe he's driving
away the darkness of his defensive act, like he has
killed and therefore, even though he's acting in self defense,

(46:40):
now he has to contend with like the darkness of
what he has just done, and he's driving that away.
Horrack in his book contends that we might think of this, maybe,
you know, as again another example of mythic battle in
the darkness, which we see in various sagas. But he
asked some questions like is this monster real? Is this
a projection of the heroes mind? Again, it's the sort

(47:01):
of film where various interpretations are possible, the no right
or wrong answers.

Speaker 3 (47:06):
So then we get to day three. The boy appears
to be in his twenties now, and we see him
come up over a hilltop to look out on this
big sand flat with a sort of temple in the distance,
and he hears the whispered voices again. One of them says,
straight ahead, you must go there looking at the temple. Now,

(47:26):
I don't know if you have thoughts about the style
of this temple. Rob there's sort of a so first
of all, there's a a big haul that we just
see as like a rock facade, but then out in
front of it there is a rock carving of a
domed head with an open mouth and these wild eyes,
kind of empty wild eyes, and giant hands held in

(47:47):
an open poem position.

Speaker 2 (47:50):
Yeah, the general vibe of these ruins reminding me a
little bit of photos I've seen of the ancient heads
of the gods in Nimrout Dog Turkey. Imagine many of
you out there have seen these images before, with kind
of conical looking hats on the heads.

Speaker 3 (48:08):
Oh, I just looked it up, and yeah, I can
see the comparison. That is kind of interesting.

Speaker 4 (48:12):
Though.

Speaker 3 (48:12):
It's almost like some aspects feel a little bit like this,
some feel a little a little more like like Mesoamerican art.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
Absolutely, yeah, so I guess it. Yet, it fittingly feels
akin to various examples of real world the design traditions,
but it feels also removed in its own thing. When
I was looking around on letterboxed, I found a pretty
great little review. Someone by the name of Roland one
oh six said quote man walks through a series of

(48:42):
prog album covers in order to save his people from
their eight day life spans, which I legitimately laughed at
that and it's kind of spot on. There are many
many scenes in this picture that could easily be a
prog rock album cover.

Speaker 3 (48:57):
Yes, yes, including the very next thing I was going
to talk about, which is that as the boy is
coming or I guess he's a young man now, as
the hero is coming down to cross the plain of
sand to get to the temple, there's another thing he sees.
At first, I was confused how this interacted with the
other thing. But there's like a giant teardrop shaped rock

(49:19):
descending slowly from the sky, and there appears to be
a sort of castle or something on top of it.

Speaker 2 (49:26):
Yeah, this is actually mentioned in the book. This is
apparently an homage to one of Saalbass's favorite visual works,
The Castle of the Pyrenees by Belgian surrealist Renee Margrite.
This is a work from nineteen fifty nine, and apparently
Saul loved this image and had just been looking for
an opportunity to somehow utilize it in his work. There's

(49:50):
a Wikipedia article about this particular painting, and I included
a sample of it here in our notes for you, Joe.

Speaker 3 (49:58):
Yeah, it looks exactly the same, so clearly, yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:01):
I could be wrong, but I feel like something just
like this also eventually pops up in Dungeons and Dragons,
So some of you dn D lord nerds out there
will have to remind me what I'm thinking of, because
I feel like I've seen an homage to this piece
in Dungeons and Dragons art as well.

Speaker 3 (50:20):
I thought you were going to say Zardas, it's like
the Zardas head, except it's not a head, it's just
a big rock.

Speaker 2 (50:25):
But yeah, I mean I think there's some shared DNA
between some of the design work here and the design
work of Zardas as well.

Speaker 3 (50:32):
Okay, so the hero tries to cross the sand flat,
but when he gets into the sand, he begins to sink,
and at first I was like, oh, no, it's like
a quick sand trap. He's gonna have to get out,
but no, it goes in a different direction. Instead. He
is able to move through the sand, but it's like
rising up to his chest and occasionally up to his chin,
but he just wades on through like its water, and

(50:54):
he makes his way all the way across the sand
flat this way, which I thought was I don't know,
the strange, unexpected, and obviously I don't think you can
really do that. You can't move through sand that you're
that deepened, and it would just there'd be too much resistance.
But it's like water, and he just passes through it.

Speaker 2 (51:12):
This sequence, in particular reminds me of some of the
sand related imagery that we get in Phase four.

Speaker 3 (51:18):
Oh yeah, I agree. It also reminds me of a
weird sort of sand progressing through a sand chamber scene
in the Tarkowsky movie Stalker. But eventually the hero comes
out the other side to stand on the stairs of
the temple. I didn't mention this earlier, but next to
the human head there's kind of a big eagle head

(51:38):
as well. And then suddenly there's an earthquake. The carvings
at the entrance to the temple begin to crumble and
fall all around him, and the hero has to dodge
some boulders, but he survives. Now I think it's suggesting
the earthquake is caused by the huge tear drop asteroid
settling into the sand, like it has finally touched down

(51:59):
and that shakes the air.

Speaker 2 (52:00):
I think so. But again, as to exactly what all
this means, I mean, we're left to ponder that, like
all of this, I'm assuming all of this is somehow
tied to the history of these people, that these used
to be their cities, that these are their temples, they
or their tombs. We're not sure. But as to what

(52:23):
the giant tear drop asteroid truly signifies, like, is this
the spaceship that brought them there? Because I know in
the original Bradbury it has to do. There's like a
crash spaceship that's part of the plot, and so we
might see some fantastic echo of that concept here.

Speaker 3 (52:38):
But the voices in the hero's head they tell him
to go on, so he does. He goes into the
temple and then we see from inside the giant head
with light pouring in through the eyes, which is very cool.
And then inside the temple there is a swarm of
star like particles suspended inside a blue light, much like
the blue light that the boy uncovered in his schooling.

(53:00):
But before he can make sense of it, the temple
continues to crumble and it just rocks and blocks are falling,
and he's driven away, driven on into a different place,
a tube like corridor sort of the inside of the spaceworm,
where the Falcon lands and Empire strikes back. Yea, but
with a raised metal boardwalk. He's saying, I'm going through

(53:22):
the boardwalk in the swamp or something, and he moves
on down the gangway and then finally we come to
a different landscape and it announces is day four. Baby,
Here we are day four, and he's standing in front
of massive Egyptian temple architecture with rows and rows of columns,

(53:42):
and I forget the name of the temple I have
in mind, but there is an Egyptian temple I'm thinking
of that looks like this, and he's passing through the
courtyard and it somehow seems to lead into a different universe,
like when he comes to the other end there is
a another flat sandy plain, but this one is bathed

(54:03):
in blue light with pyramids that look like the Giza
Complex in the distance, and then beyond that giant planets
looming in the sky.

Speaker 4 (54:14):
Huge. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:15):
Yeah, So at this point I'm definitely questioning the whole
Make sure you set it on Earth ray, yeah, yeah,
directive here, because we really feel like we're in another
world at this point. We are, at least if we're
not on another planet the whole time, then we are
somewhere else at this point.

Speaker 3 (54:31):
Yes, you know, I don't mean to diminish it by
by this comparison, but it's hard not to feel some
Star Wars influence on this. For one thing, he like,
he comes up to a hooded man resting against one
of the columns. He's almost in a kind of either
obi wan kenobi or jahwa outfit. The hooded figure in
the desert and he comes up to the sky. No

(54:55):
face is visible, but the hero is looking out on
this blue landscape with the pyramid and the planets like
passing into and out of alignment in the sky. The
planets are moving super fast. And then the hooded man
starts to talk. He says, so they sent another one.
Let's have a look at you. Yes, you're young, much
younger than I was when I got here. And the

(55:16):
hooded man reveals that he was the last hero, but
he started too late, he says. The younger man does
have a chance, and he gives him advice. He says,
look at that pyramid, don't go around it. You have
to climb to the top.

Speaker 2 (55:30):
All right, some fortune cookie sort of advice there, but
it feels specific to this challenge as well.

Speaker 3 (55:36):
Oh sure. And you know, this actually made me think
about one of I was going to say, one of
the shadow themes of Quest, and it's something that has
to do with trust. So our hero, at multiple times
throughout the story, we get little different ways that he
just has to believe the advice given to him and

(56:00):
follow it because he doesn't have enough time to see
and investigate for himself. And so he just meets this
random stranger here, and the stranger gives him advice and
he just follows it, and we're sort of to understand
that he doesn't really have a choice. I mean, I
guess he could try to not follow it, but seems

(56:22):
more likely that would result in him failing his mission
as well.

Speaker 2 (56:26):
Yeah, like if he said, no, Grandpa, I needed I
want to do my own research on this, like, you know,
then you're going to die in the desert like this guy.

Speaker 4 (56:32):
And and it.

Speaker 3 (56:33):
Makes me think about the relationship between time and trust.
You know, this is this is actually a core thing
about what trust is. Trust is a thing that saves
you time because if you didn't. If you had unlimited
time and resources, you could investigate everything for yourself like

(56:56):
you could, you know, look into every you look endlessly
into every question and not have to believe anything people
told you. But you don't have unlimited time and resources.
You're always trying to make your life more efficient, so
you have to rely on trust for some things. And
so a big part of what we think about in
navigating life is just like where we decide to press

(57:20):
the trust button to save ourselves time and this and
this scenario created by the movie heightens that kind of
the observation of that dynamic because time is so constricted
and so he just literally does not have time to
wonder whether this guy is giving him good advice or not.
He just has to follow it. Yeah, And then also

(57:41):
the guy says, not everything that frightens or hurts you
as bad. Fear and pain are your teachers learn survive.
So the young man hurries on through the desert. And meanwhile,
also he's another thing he asked to trust, is he's
been being given these voices in his head. They're giving
him advice. They're saying, you are not alone, we travel
with you. So there's a scene where the hero gets

(58:12):
to the stairs, he has to climb. He has to
climb to the top of the pyramid, and the stairs
seem endless, but he goes on up and up and up,
and then finally he gets to the top, where he
finds a table emitting a blue light. Looks almost like
a game board. I was thinking that at first, and
then what do you know, It does seem like it's
a game board. It's covered in the shapes that the

(58:32):
boy learned to manipulate in school. And then suddenly there
is a roar, and we're like, oh, another monster sort of,
There is a sasquatchlike creature, like a big, furry humanoid
creature that approaches him, but it's not another fight to
the death with a spear. This time we're facing the chess.
YETI our hero has to play a board game, a

(58:57):
game of strategy with Bigfoot, and I think may have
been my favorite creative choice in the film.

Speaker 2 (59:04):
Yes, I absolutely love this on one level because it
is just that outrageous, Like, at this point everything has
already been surreal and dream like and full of WTF
moments and then we have this. But then it again
is one of these moments too. Where it's never fully explained.
We don't know who or what this entity is, but

(59:26):
there are so many different ways to tease it apart.
Horrick and his book brings up the possibility that this
is sort of like the ID, that his own ID
that he is combating here. That least, they're like his,
this is his primal side. And I did when I
was originally watching it, I did kind of notice some
similarities between the face of the beast and the face

(59:49):
of our hero. I don't know how much of that
was me just, you know, reading too much into it
or not, but I think there are various interpretations here.
But what we get at the end of the day
is the game of chess or something like chess with
this bestial other.

Speaker 3 (01:00:07):
That is funny. I mean, so, on one hand, I
absolutely see the comparison in the way they're embodied, that
this creature may be some reflection of his more savage self.
On the other hand, like why would you be Why
is the form of conflict a game of strategy? Why
are you playing chess against your ID?

Speaker 4 (01:00:26):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:00:26):
Well, I mean you don't want to wrestle it? Look
how strong this is get out smarted?

Speaker 3 (01:00:31):
I guess so so the game itself is kind of
tronish that it's like these metal shapes, these polyhedron game
pieces that are zoom zooming around and zapping each other
with lasers. And then, of course, eventually the YETI loses
and he doesn't like that. You know, yetti's are known

(01:00:52):
to rip people's arms off and they lose. So he
howls in anger, and he drools and rages very bad sport,
and he seems ready to kill our hero. But suddenly
it's a little unclear exactly the orientation of what's happening here,
but like a walkway extends out through space toward the pyramid,

(01:01:12):
leading to another structure, and then the hero leaps out
onto the walkway and goes away to this other place.

Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
The challenge has been overcome.

Speaker 3 (01:01:20):
Yes, so this other place is a lattice of mcsher
beams that are interlocking in impossible ways.

Speaker 4 (01:01:29):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:01:30):
So yeah, at this point, like where are we Like,
are we it within the confines of some great supercomputer?
Are we in another dimension? I Mean it's hard to
say exactly what's going on here, and that's the beauty
of it.

Speaker 3 (01:01:44):
Yeah, in one of the rooms, the hero goes into
here seems to be inside the game he just played,
like he's in shrunken form, and the game pieces are
the giant shapes moving around him. He walks on the board,
and of course Scale is being played with one again,
like I mentioned at the beginning. But then at one point,
the man, oh, and we're told I can't remember if

(01:02:05):
ilread he said this, but if not, this is day five,
so this is supposed to this is the time they
said earlier that he would be in midlife. And at
one point the man is he's sort of messing around
on the game board with these pieces, and then he
looks at his reflection in a metal piece and he
says to himself, he realizes he is getting old, and

(01:02:25):
he has to hurry. He has to get to the gate.
And I was like, wait a minute, is this literally
a midlife crisis vignette?

Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
He's like, well maybe so.

Speaker 3 (01:02:33):
Yeah, he's like messing around playing games in this confusing space,
and then he looks at himself in the mirror and
has a sudden reminder of his mortality, and then he
really picks up the pace.

Speaker 2 (01:02:45):
Yeah, he doesn't know that he should also buy a
leather jacket and look into motorcycles or something.

Speaker 3 (01:02:50):
Right, So we see him traveling through other weird landscapes,
some natural, some artificial. One is like, I don't even
know what you call it, like a big flat, empty
rectangular space that looks out onto looks out like into
the void, and there are planets beyond, so it's almost

(01:03:11):
as if he's in a spaceship. There's another point where
he's wandering through this huge field of just pits that
are inverted step pyramids.

Speaker 2 (01:03:23):
Yeah, this must be where like maybe they cut the
pyramids from earlier out of this landscape. I don't know. Yeah,
a landscape of just colossal works. I guess this is
what we're to take from it.

Speaker 3 (01:03:33):
And I love these landscapes. The sets are amazing. But
then finally, finally Day seven comes. He's getting old, and
he makes it to the gate, the gate that was promised.
So he comes upon this sort of hole in the
rocks where light is spilling through, and he walks up
to it and realizes a giant mechanism, this big metal

(01:03:57):
bar is descending toward him slowly, and when it reaches him,
the mechanism has controls that have hand prints on them
that he could put his hands in. It's kind of
like that button that makes air on Mars and total recall,
you know, a metal thing with a handprint on it.
So he's like, okay, I got to put my hands

(01:04:18):
on it. So he puts his hands in the prints,
and it makes music. It releases this booming tone, and
then the whole mechanism sinks into the floor and the
gate opens and light spills over everything, not just on
the man there in the place, but light seems to
spill over the whole planet. So we go back to
the place we came from. We see light filling in

(01:04:42):
the caverns where the people from the First Day live,
and there are lots of old people there, but we
get to hear their heartbeats slowing down as the light
pours over them. And the light is of a very
different color warmth than the stuff we've seen before. Most
of the movie has been kind of blue green gray.

(01:05:03):
The light now is orange. And then we return to
the hero and we find him in a land, in
a natural landscape, unlike anything we've seen before. Now the
world is green, green, green. He's on these hills covered
in green grass, not the kind of pale, gross blue
green of the fog in the world before. Now it's
like vibrant green, springtime green, the hills covered in green

(01:05:27):
grass and trees with flowers blooming everywhere, and the man
is just walking through it looking like Jesus.

Speaker 2 (01:05:35):
Yeah, kind of a like a seventies white Jesus, kind
of like a Kinney Loggin's kind of a look here, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:05:41):
Exactly, yes, like hippie movie Jesus.

Speaker 4 (01:05:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:05:45):
But he's got a magnificent beard, and you can tell
he's just vibing on the nature that he's looking at.
And then the boy's like looking at the plants. I
don't know why I called him the boy. He's a
man now, he's just mere days old, so that is true.
He's like looking at the plants. And then we get
some narration where it's an ending that is at once
a little bit a little bit corny, but also kind

(01:06:07):
of beautiful. He says, of all the twenty thousand days
I have, which day will be the finest, which will
be the best? Any day, any hour, any minute, And
then we end as like geese are flying across this
disc of the sun.

Speaker 2 (01:06:22):
I mean, it's so upbeat and positive, and I think
if you dig into it, it does get into some
serious depth, you know, I mean, how do you how
do you overcome the shortness of our lives and the
marching of time? Well, one way is by retreating into
the now and focusing on the now, focusing on any day,

(01:06:45):
any hour, any minute, you know, finding those little things,
you know. So that's that's what came to my mind
when I heard this. But on the other level, yes,
it is like such an upbeat ending. I don't know.
We get more used to more past mystic endings in
our films, so I don't know, it was it was
refreshing that it does feel so optimistic at the end,

(01:07:09):
like he succeeded in his quest. He brought life to everyone,
and in the revelation here is perhaps a little deeper
if we dig into it.

Speaker 3 (01:07:18):
Well, in another one of those observations that is both
profound and true and also can be kind of corny,
but that doesn't make it any less true. Is the
thing about you know, you can you can overcome the
kind of despair about the perspective of the shortness of
your life by having purpose, by having by having a mission,
by having a purpose that a purpose that is sort

(01:07:40):
of other oriented. You know that is driven towards not
just yourself and your own gratification, but living for others.

Speaker 2 (01:07:47):
Well, you know, it reminds me of against some of
what we've been discussing in our Mystery cult series. So
a lot of times some of the best nuggets of
wisdom are also kind of overstatements the obvious, like, you know,
love is all you need, love is the fifth element,
what have you? You know, But these are also things
that are true, and it all comes down to presentation.

(01:08:10):
And in the same way we talked about some of
the initiations of the mystery cults, where there might be
something that is key to the initiation, something that is
revealed in a box, and if you just take it
out of context, if you're a critic and you're just like,
look at this thing they have in the box here,
how corny is that? You know? But if it's within context,
if it occurs at the end of the initiation, then

(01:08:31):
perhaps it is able to settle into your psyche in
a more rewarding way.

Speaker 4 (01:08:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:08:36):
So just for example, you know, you could say, like
a Demeter is reunited with her daughter, and this brings us,
you know, this ear of grain, which represents the wealth
the fruits of our fields, and it is what we
live by. You know, if you just like put it
in those words, somebody could be like, oh yeah, okay,
that's not all that impressive. But if you watch the
whole drama and you take part in the suffering and

(01:08:58):
the passion and the relief of the re union of
mother and daughter and all that, it can be overwhelming.
It's something that follows you every day of your life.
You never never look at some flower the same way.

Speaker 4 (01:09:08):
Again.

Speaker 2 (01:09:08):
Yeah again, not everything that frightens or hurts you as
bad fear and pain or your teachers learn survive.

Speaker 3 (01:09:14):
Yeah yeah. I think the real moral of the story
is if you're feeling down, play chess with a yetti
and make sure you win.

Speaker 2 (01:09:22):
Yes, all right, that is nineteen eighty four's quest. Again,
if you wish to experience it as well, you should
be able to find it out there, and again, hopefully
in the future there'll be some sort of proper restored
release as well. Just a reminder for everyone out there
that stuff to Blow your Mind is primarily a science
and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,

(01:09:43):
but on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to
just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema.
If you're on letterbox dot com you can find us.
Our username is weird House and we have a nice
list there of all the episodes that we have covered
so far, all the movies we have covered so far. Rather,
and I will remind you that at this point we're

(01:10:04):
at one ninety six, so we're coming in hot on
selection two hundred. We already have some recommendations for what
that episode might be, what film we could possibly cover
for the two hundredth Weird House Cinema selection, but continue
to ride in. We have not made a decision as yet.

Speaker 3 (01:10:21):
It's going to be Mortal Kombat Annihilation.

Speaker 2 (01:10:25):
It could be it could be that that is the
most fitting choice.

Speaker 3 (01:10:28):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:10:49):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app
Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,