Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Quest (1984)

In this classic 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. (originally published 3/14/2025)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, you welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. This is
Rob Lamb and let's see we have a fun one
to talk about here today. This one originally published three fourteen,
twenty twenty five. It's our episode on the nineteen eighty
four saw An The Lame Bass short film Quest. This
one is a visionary take on human mortality, written by
the Great Ray Brad Perry.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Let's have it.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob.

Speaker 4 (00:43):
Lamb and this is Joe McCormick.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
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 where the concept of an imagistic religion has been
key to our our discussions. There infrequent high sensory rights
of passage, and I feel like today's film matches up

(01:06):
with that 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 the 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

(01:28):
hour long, but that's fitting given the subject matter, and
boy does it pack a lot in So what's the movie.
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 Lucio

(01:50):
Fulci's Conquest. This is Quest. It is adapted for the
screen written by Ray Bradbury, and it is directed by
Saul and Elaine Bass.

Speaker 4 (02:00):
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

(02:21):
very last couple of minutes where it got super weird,
and it almost felt like, you know, that that level
of weirdness was being held back for much of the runtime.
I think that is not something you could say about Quest.

Speaker 1 (02:35):
Now, this film is all abstract and surreal weirdness. It
is not held back by the necessities of for the
most part, of 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 4 (02:56):
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

(03:19):
shortened life spans.

Speaker 1 (03:20):
Yes, yes, we have a chosen one, we have a quest,
and yeah it's quite an adventure.

Speaker 4 (03:27):
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 the

(03:47):
sort of settings that we get Because there were sort
of natural settings we see our hero wandering through rocky
landscapes and you know, mountain mountain passes and plains and
things like that. But then all as 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 an

(04:11):
mc escher drawing.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
Yeah, yeah, they 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 perhaps been stripped
from tron somehow.

Speaker 4 (04:32):
Yes. Yes, it starts a tour and ends esher Yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
All right, my elevator pitch for this one, I just
dug up a quick Bible verse teach us to number our.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
Days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Speaker 4 (04:46):
Yeah, that'll come up later.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
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 5 (05:12):
Is this the one one?

Speaker 6 (05:17):
Day from now, you'll be a grown boy two or three,
young man, five, middle age seven old. In eight days.

Speaker 7 (05:34):
You'll stop and die. Listen to our hearts race. Listen
to your own heart race.

Speaker 6 (05:49):
We are locked away in the world where our lives
speak through time.

Speaker 5 (05:52):
In eight days, no time to see, to feel, to know.
It's time now the teaching begins.

Speaker 8 (06:21):
Listen to them, no honqutution them.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
All right now.

Speaker 1 (06:35):
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 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

(06:58):
not yet. Hopefully there's some sort of you know, collected
short films of Saul in the Lane bass disc that'll
come out in the future, and when it does, we
will certainly promote it here on Weird 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

(07:18):
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 at Eternal TV, 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,

(07:38):
their catalog often matches up with weird house cinema tastes.
But I'm confident that if you are 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 all clearly need.

Speaker 4 (07:55):
All right, should we talk about the connections.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah, let's start at the top with the direct 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 only his slash there.
I may go back and forth from referring to him

(08:18):
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,
But on Quest they are co directors and are credited
as such. But yeah, Phase four was their only feature
length directorial credit, a film that, yeah, we might describe

(08:42):
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 in its theatrical cut,
but absolutely explodes in a cinematic acid trip if you
watch the original ending, which is even weirder and stranger.

Speaker 4 (09:02):
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 win, 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

(09:23):
is increasingly completely incomprehensible because we are unable to understand
the intelligence or desire or or what is meaningful to
the ant powers that are governing our lives.

Speaker 1 (09:36):
Yeah, it's kind of unclear if it's that a downer
ending or a happy ending, because it's that surreal and
out there, like it's it's beyond your human expectations of
good and bad endings.

Speaker 4 (09:48):
You cannot imagine an ant ruled world. You just can't
even get there now.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
Saubass 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
Saul Bass on our episode regarding Phase four again. He
was the title sequence slash title design guy of his era.

(10:15):
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

(10:37):
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 Good Fellas, Kate Beer, and Casino. The
credits to Mad Men on TV. This was an homage

(10:58):
to his work he did 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 Elaine Bass, a book titled Saalbath's Anatomy of

(11:18):
Film Design by Jan Christopher Horrock, which of course has
a great deal to say about their approach to art,
everything from you know, title and loco design work to
of course their cinematic output. And again, from about nineteen
sixty onward, Elaine was his longtime creative partner who worked

(11:41):
with him on pretty much most of these projects. So
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 and the unseen world. This one was narrated by

(12:03):
Vic Perrin, who recently talked about the voice of the
Outer Limits and also the Gargoyle.

Speaker 4 (12:08):
The narrator at the beginning of Gargoyles and dubbed in
on Bernie Casey's g Gargoyle King.

Speaker 1 (12:14):
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

(12:37):
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, it's

(13:00):
the origin 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

(13:20):
Mokichio Kata who lived eighteen eighty two through nineteen fifty five.
A religious movement that promotes spiritual cleansing via the Divine light.

Speaker 4 (13:31):
WHOA I did not expect it to take this turn.

Speaker 2 (13:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:34):
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 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

(13:55):
issue of Idea, and so they approached him about creating
a visionary film to play in the church's temples and spaces.
So Saal 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

(14:15):
the church and quote a positive film that doesn't view
life as a prelude to a disaster.

Speaker 4 (14:21):
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 1 (14:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (14:51):
The final product.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
And he thought, really, I mean, and 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 4 (15:07):
It's like when the Baptist Church of la funded Plan
nine from Outer Space.

Speaker 1 (15:12):
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 that I understand them of the
church in question here. But otherwise the plot the finished

(15:36):
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
like preaching the gospel of this particular faith.

Speaker 4 (15:50):
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
overt Christian terms or ideas in it, apart from the themes.

Speaker 1 (16:05):
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

(16:26):
times a day at the church's headquarters for a period
of four years.

Speaker 4 (16:31):
Wow does that beat Rocky Horror for the longest theatrical
run just in terms of total number of plays?

Speaker 2 (16:39):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (16:39):
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. That being said, I don't think they're playing

(17:02):
the same film every day, four times a day. 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 I
read in Quors 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,

(17:22):
which allegedly this allegedly stifled some of its reach, so
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 4 (17:41):
Wow, that's really interesting.

Speaker 1 (17:43):
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 in Hight four fifty one,
The Illustrated Man, The October Country, and so forth. He

(18:05):
was 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.
It Came from Outer Space in fifty three, which we
may come back to on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 4 (18:21):
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

(18:41):
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 1 (18:47):
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 Brebery 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,

(19:11):
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 overtly alien planet. That seems like a reasonable

(19:33):
budgetary request, though having seen the full film, I feel
like we get very unearthly.

Speaker 4 (19:38):
Yeah. Yeah, at least half of it's taken place in
geometry textbook illustrations, not on any landscape I would recognize.

Speaker 1 (19:48):
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 lifespan 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 get

(20:09):
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 4 (20:24):
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 1 (20:43):
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

(21:04):
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
cross generational efforts and so forth. Now, as for the

(21:27):
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 who are notable

(21:49):
because of their work elsewhere, and my apologies to anyone
that I did leave out.

Speaker 2 (21:56):
Because of this.

Speaker 1 (21:57):
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 will end with him
as a mature adult man. But we have different actors
playing him, and it's not a makeup effect.

Speaker 4 (22:17):
That would have been a good choice though, if you
had a baby the whole time with just makeup and
making the older.

Speaker 1 (22:23):
Yeah or win in both directions, you know, have like
a twenty five year old actor and then age him
and de age him all the way down to baby.
All right. One of the early characters we encounter in
this is an unnam character that I thought of as
the elder, some sort of a wise older individual who

(22:44):
is looking for the chosen one and finds the chosen one.

Speaker 4 (22:49):
And this is the monklike guy who does the palm
reading on the baby at the beginning.

Speaker 2 (22:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:55):
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 fours The Mask of Demetrios. This is

(23:19):
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 Disney's 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, this is, of course,

(23:43):
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 4 (23:51):
I thought he looked familiar. Yeah, is this the day too, boy?

Speaker 1 (23:56):
Yeah, this is the boy that I believe begins the journey. Right,
He's passed his tests and he's then setting out on
the journey.

Speaker 4 (24:04):
He graduated Harvard College jail where he got into a
and then he gets to go out on the journey.

Speaker 1 (24:10):
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 4 (24:20):
Oh, the hooded guy at the Egyptian temple.

Speaker 1 (24:23):
Yeah, I believe this is Bill Irwin. I could be
wrong on this. Bill Irwin lived 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 4 (24:43):
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 (24:53):
Just always old?

Speaker 1 (24:55):
Yeah, it's like William Hickey late in life if you
played contankerous old men, and also early in his career.

Speaker 2 (25:04):
So all right.

Speaker 1 (25:06):
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,
But I just think of it as as soothing, other
worldly cascade of electronic bliss and intrigue.

Speaker 4 (25:22):
Oh yeah, yeah, just whipped butter synthesizer auras of really
good stuff, a lot of great, you know, good 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 bass tones,

(25:44):
and 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 t
and you went to put in that same synth flute voicing,

(26:04):
it would sound really tenny and hokey to you, so
you would use something else. But if you go back
to these compositions that feature it, it's actually great.

Speaker 1 (26:13):
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

(26:35):
a fitting sonic incarnation of that light.

Speaker 4 (26:39):
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 good use of sonic textures.

Speaker 1 (26:56):
So the people behind the music here, well, Elaine Bass
is credited on the music. She was, of note, 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 birthdate for him,
but he is apparently still active on the San Francisco

(27:16):
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 have an acoustic act together,
and there's a They also have some some some some
brief bio information about Van Campen. Van Campen is a

(27:37):
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 4 (27:49):
I just looked up Wait No l a Beatles tribute band.

Speaker 1 (27:53):
Yeah, yeah, at one point, uh yeah, I think, I think,
and I think they still do a lot of covers
of Beatles songs of looking at They're still doing gig.
If you're in San Francisco, you can go out and
catch these guys. Tell them we sent you.

Speaker 4 (28:06):
Please request a Beatles tune and then request the theme
from Quest.

Speaker 2 (28:13):
Now.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
Prior to this film, Van Kempen 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, followed in nineteen eighty eight with
the score for the film In Dangerous Company. He's also

(28:35):
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 such clients
as AT and T, various TV channels and film studios,

(28:57):
So I know, I just think he did a lot
of a lot of like mercenary sound work you know,
and so 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 4 (29:10):
They could have also just sourced pre existing composition.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
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.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
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 4 (29:35):
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

(29:58):
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, you know, a dark age in a way.
And then there's a voiceover that says, before the gate

(30:20):
was closed and the light began to fail, the ancients
lived a long and fruitful life. Now our lifespan is
eight days. 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

(30:40):
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 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 the
camera at normal eye level for a person. But then

(31:03):
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 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

(31:26):
I think it's the latter, though there will be similar
kind of scale inversions that happen later in the story
as well.

Speaker 1 (31:33):
Yeah, yeah, to it 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 4 (31:44):
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 are living abject lives
of kind of darkness and ignorance and want. But the

(32:08):
first thing we get to with these people is a
scene of childbirth. 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 elders say it's too early to tell,

(32:31):
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 1 (32:51):
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

(33:12):
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 and anthrop anthropologists reflecting on what life was like
for our ancestors before people were able to specialize more,

(33:35):
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 4 (33:49):
Yeah, that is interesting, 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 not it's

(34:12):
not a beast you can fight, though there will be
some beasts to fight in the story. It's just like
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 1 (34:27):
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,

(34:49):
you know. So it's yeah again. The film itself has
a great mythic vibe. It feels like an initiation into
some great secret.

Speaker 4 (35:00):
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,

(35:23):
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

(35:45):
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 2 (36:05):
Oh.

Speaker 4 (36:05):
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 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,

(36:26):
putting my ear to the hearts of pets and hearing
their faster little heartbeats, you know, their small bodies and
little metabolisms.

Speaker 2 (36:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:34):
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 as well,

(36:55):
that's maybe leaning a little bit into the fantastic, and
it's not entirely base on real world human teaching and
conveying of information.

Speaker 4 (37:05):
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

(37:26):
the baby away and the old man sort of calls
after the baby's saying, now the teaching begins. Learn quickly
little one and ooh, 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

(37:46):
looks like stuff that would be fun to handle in
the same way that D and D dice are.

Speaker 1 (37:51):
Yeah. Yeah, it's all very tactile 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.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
Unknown to our world. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:08):
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

(38:29):
transferred 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 maybe there is some sort of psychic connection. And
in fact, later on, when our hero has commenced on
his journey and he hears the voices of his teachers.

(38:54):
I mean, perhaps that is like a psychic echo of
what has occurred previously.

Speaker 4 (38:59):
Yeah, yeah, I like that too. It invites questions of like,
is there actual telepathy going on or the teachers currently
communicating with him as he goes beyond, or is it
like now part of them is in him and he
just carries it with them?

Speaker 1 (39:14):
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 4 (39:22):
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, 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 the blocks. But what does it mean? I

(39:44):
don't know, 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

(40:06):
and then 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 and blocks
of wood. I liked that it was strange, and then

(40:26):
making spears out of a kind of silvery metal. 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

(40:48):
metal box, 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

(41:09):
man tells him it's time for you to go.

Speaker 1 (41:14):
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 2 (41:21):
That's it, that's all we had time for.

Speaker 4 (41:23):
Yeah. I do remember that about a lot of lesson
plans when I was younger. A fantastic lack of closure
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

(41:45):
must be opened. You will open it.

Speaker 1 (41:48):
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
Okada often described as kind of like an energy healing doctrine.

Speaker 4 (42:03):
Hmm.

Speaker 1 (42:03):
Okay, And I've also read that that it sometimes involves
like the use of some sort of reflective medallion, which
we also see a version of in this picture.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
Oh.

Speaker 4 (42:12):
Interesting. Okay, I was wondering about that. Okay, so maybe
they did get a few little like specific things in there.

Speaker 2 (42:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (42:20):
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 over 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
left when they were too old, they left too late,

(42:42):
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
the You've learned your lessons quickly. You're strong and intelligent,
you have curiosity. And the boy says, but have I
learned augh? And the old man does not answer the question.

(43:02):
He just says, we don't have time to teach you anymore.
You'll have to learn the rest on your way.

Speaker 1 (43:08):
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 4 (43:18):
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 1 (43:28):
Here's your silvery space spear. Go out and do your best.

Speaker 4 (43:41):
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 mirror polished metal pendant to hang
around his neck, which may be connecting to that actual

(44:01):
religious item used by the whatever, I forget what 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. Then he goes.
So the boy sets out into the world. And now, oh,
and this is, by the way, we get a title

(44:21):
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,
and mountains in the background. At one point we see

(44:41):
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
have prepared you well, be brave, don't worry. And the

(45:04):
boy wanders in darkness through this 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.
What is it? What's making the sound? And there's a stillness,
feathers fall on the rocks around him, and then a
monster attacks.

Speaker 1 (45:22):
Yeah, and it's a pretty cool monster, I have to.

Speaker 4 (45:24):
Say, that's right. So the monster, whatever it is, first
thrashes around in the darkness, roaring at 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 head

(45:47):
is a little bit rancorish.

Speaker 1 (45:49):
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 ye,
which would of course be a giant, very giant artic grade.

Speaker 4 (46:01):
It's actually also, in fact drawn 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 all 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. This

(46:25):
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 1 (46:46):
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,

(47:10):
now he has to contend with like the darkness of
what he has just done, and he's driving that away.
Hourk in his book contends that we might think of
this maybe 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 hero's mind? Again, it's the sort of film

(47:31):
where various interpretations are possible, there no right or wrong answers.

Speaker 4 (47:36):
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,

(47:56):
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 big, 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

(48:17):
an open palm position.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:21):
The general vibe of these ruins reminding me a little
bit of photos I've seen of the ancient heads of
the gods in Nimroot Dog Turkey. Imagine many of you
out there have seen these images before, with kind of
conical looking hats on the heads.

Speaker 5 (48:38):
Oh.

Speaker 4 (48:38):
I just looked it up, and yeah, I can see
the comparison. That is kind of interesting, though. It's almost
like some aspects feel a little bit like this, some
feel a little a little more like like Mesoamerican art.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
Absolutely, Yeah, so I guess it. Yeah, It fittingly feels
akin to various examples of real world does 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 prog

(49:12):
album covers in order to save his people from their
eight day lifespans, 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 4 (49:27):
Yes, yes, including the very next thing I was going
to talk about, which is that as the boy is
coming to 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

(49:48):
shaped rock descending slowly from the sky, and there appears
to be a sort of castle or something on top
of it.

Speaker 1 (49:56):
Yeah, this is actually mentioned in the book. This is
apparently an ome 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 it had just been looking for
an opportunity to somehow utilize it in his work. There's

(50:19):
a Wikipedia article about this particular painting, and I included
a sample of it here in our notes for you, Joe.

Speaker 4 (50:27):
Yeah, I mean it looks exactly the same, so clearly, yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:30):
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 4 (50:49):
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 1 (50:55):
But yeah, I mean I think there's some shared DNA
between some of the design work here and the design
and work of Zardis as well.

Speaker 4 (51:01):
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

(51:23):
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 deep, and it would just there'd be too much resistance.
But it's like water, and he just passes through it.

Speaker 1 (51:42):
This sequence, in particular reminds me of some of the
sand related imagery that we get in Phase four.

Speaker 4 (51:47):
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 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

(52:08):
head 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,

(52:28):
and that shakes the earth.

Speaker 2 (52:30):
I think so.

Speaker 1 (52:31):
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 or their tombs. We're not sure.

(52:52):
But as to what 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 4 (53:08):
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
starlike particles suspended inside a blue light, much like the
blue light that the boy uncovered in his schooling. But

(53:29):
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. Yeah,
but with a raised metal boardwalk. He's saying, I'm going

(53:51):
through 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.

Speaker 5 (54:12):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (54:12):
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
another flat sandy plain, but this one is bathed in

(54:33):
blue light, with pyramids that look like the Giza Complex
in the distance, and then beyond that giant planets looming
in the sky.

Speaker 5 (54:43):
Huge.

Speaker 2 (54:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (54:45):
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 lea if we're
not on another planet the whole time, then we are
some where else at this point.

Speaker 4 (55:01):
Yes, you know, I don't mean to diminish it by
this comparison, but it's hard not to feel some Star
Wars influence on this. For one thing, 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

(55:23):
he comes up to the sky. No face is visible,
but the hero is looking out on this blue landscape
with the pyramids 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

(55:43):
was when I got here, And the 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 1 (56:00):
All right, some fortune cookie sort of advice there, but
it feels specific to this challenge as well.

Speaker 4 (56:06):
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

(56:29):
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

(56:52):
more likely that would result in him failing his mission
as well.

Speaker 1 (56:55):
Yeah, like if he said, no, Grandpa, I need I
want to do my own research. On this like, yeah,
then you're going to die in the desert like this, kuy.

Speaker 4 (57:02):
And and it 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

(57:24):
for yourself, like 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

(57:47):
where we decide to press the trust button to save
ourselves time and this and this scenario created by the
movie heightens that kind of the observation of that dynasm
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

(58:08):
follow it. Yeah, And then also 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 has to trust is he's been being given
these voices in his head. They're giving him advice. They're saying,

(58:29):
you are not alone, We travel with you. So there's
a scene where the hero gets 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

(58:49):
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 boy learned to
manipulate in school. And then suddenly there is a roar,
and we're like, oh, another monster sort of. There is

(59:11):
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 game
of strategy with Bigfoot, and this I think may have
been my favorite creative choice in the film.

Speaker 1 (59:34):
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

(59:56):
there are so many different ways to tease it apart.
Horric and his book brings up the possibility that this
is sort of like the ID that his own ID
that he is combating here at 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

(01:00:19):
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 4 (01:00:37):
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 5 (01:00:55):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:00:56):
Well, I mean you don't want to wrestle it. Look
how strong this is? Get out smart, I guess.

Speaker 4 (01:01:01):
So. So the game itself is kind of tronish that
it's like these metal shapes, these polyhedron game pieces that
are zooming around and zapping each other with lasers. And then,
of course, eventually the YETI loses and he doesn't like that.
You know, yeti's are known to rip people's arms off

(01:01:23):
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, leading to
another structure, and then the hero leaps out onto the

(01:01:46):
walkway and goes away to this other place.

Speaker 1 (01:01:49):
The challenge has been overcome.

Speaker 4 (01:01:50):
Yes, so this other place is a lattice of mcsher
beams that are interlocking in impossible ways.

Speaker 1 (01:01:59):
Yes, 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 4 (01:02:13):
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 once
again like I mentioned at the beginning. But then at
one point, the man, oh, and we're told I can't

(01:02:34):
remember if I already 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

(01:02:55):
old and he has to hurry, he has to get
to the gate. And I was like, wait a minute,
is this literally a life crisis vignette? He's like, oh, maybe,
so 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 1 (01:03:14):
Yeah, he doesn't know that he should also buy a
leather jacket and look into motorcycles or something.

Speaker 4 (01:03:20):
Right, So we see him traveling through other weird landscapes,
some natural, some artificial. One is like a I don't
even know what you call this, 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

(01:03:41):
almost 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 1 (01:03:53):
Yeah, this must be where like maybe they cut the
pyramids from earlier out of this landscape.

Speaker 2 (01:03:58):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:03:58):
Yeah, a landscape just colossal works. I guess that's what
we're to take from it.

Speaker 4 (01:04:03):
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

(01:04:26):
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 in Total recall,
you know, a metal thing with a handprint on it.
So he's like, okay, I got to put my hands

(01:04:48):
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

(01:05:12):
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 color warmth, than the stuff we've seen before.
Most of the movie has been kind of blue green gray.

(01:05:33):
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 hills covered in green grass

(01:05:58):
and trees with flowers blue everywhere. And the man is
just walking through it looking like Jesus.

Speaker 1 (01:06:05):
Yeah, kind of a like a seventies white Jesus, kind
of like a Kenney Loggin's kind of a look here, yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:06:11):
Exactly, Yes, like hippie movie Jesus. Yeah. 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

(01:06:34):
bit a little bit corny, but also kind 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 1 (01:06:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:07:08):
Well, one way.

Speaker 1 (01:07:09):
Is is by retreating into the now and focusing on
the now, focusing on any day, 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 pessimistic endings in our films, so I don't know,

(01:07:34):
it was it was refreshing that it does feel so
optimistic at the end, 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 4 (01:07:47):
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 and you can overcome
the kind of despair about the perspective of the shortness
of your life by having purpose, by having a mission,
by having a purpose that a purpose that is sort

(01:08:10):
of other oriented, you know, that is driven towards not
just yourself and your own gratification, but living for others.

Speaker 1 (01:08:17):
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 of 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

(01:08:39):
to presentation. 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?

Speaker 2 (01:08:56):
You know?

Speaker 1 (01:08:56):
But if it's within context, if it occurs at the
end of the initiation, then perhaps it is able to
settle into your psyche in a more rewarding way.

Speaker 4 (01:09:05):
Yeah. 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's 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

(01:09:27):
the passion and the relief of the reunion 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. Again.

Speaker 1 (01:09:38):
Yeah again, not everything that frightens or hurts you is bad.
Fear and pain or your teachers learn survive.

Speaker 4 (01:09:44):
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 1 (01:09:52):
Yes, all right, that is nineteen eighty four's quest. Again,
if you wish to experience as well, you should be
able to find it out there and again, hopefully in
the future there will be some sort.

Speaker 2 (01:10:04):
Of proper restored release as well.

Speaker 1 (01:10:06):
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, 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,

(01:10:29):
all the movies we have covered so far. Rather, and
I will remind you that at this point we're 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
write in We have not made a decision as yet.

Speaker 4 (01:10:51):
It's going to be Mortal Kombat Annihilation.

Speaker 1 (01:10:55):
It could be it could be that that is the
most fitting choice.

Speaker 4 (01:10:58):
Huge thanks as always to our ex still an 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 3 (01:11:18):
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.