In this episode, about Stanley Kubrick's classic movie The Shining, we divide our interests neatly between sexual trauma and racism. Well, we attempt to divide them neatly. Andy and Alicia on the side of sex, Jake and Sagi on the side of Race. Andy starts us off by hypothesizing, in intricate detail, the possibility that the movie is about the actual sexual assault of young Danny by Jack Torrance. He also brackets everything with a comment about how endless the interpretations of this movie can ...
Jun 05, 2023•2 hr 1 min
Dear, patient listener.. We meet again, 2 weeks late, we know.. no creative endeavor is ever an assembly line and we had to drop a dud podcast by the wayside. Maybe it will be unearthed one day by a particularly desperate AI bot. Maybe we'll sell it for a million dollars as a collector's item. Until then, may it rest in peace. This week's episode asked after the origin of identifying prostitution (typically female prostitution) as "the oldest profession." One such delightful source can be found ...
May 27, 2023•1 hr 36 min
This week we discuss the movie version of John le Carré's novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold . Alicia leads us in a séance of sorts, asking us to consider why the main character, Alec Leamas (played by Richard Burton) is such an effective protagonist. To make sure the ghosts are summoned, she does not offer us any definition of effective. We float around the following themes: the questionable distinction between political methods and political policies, the difference between betrayal and t...
May 01, 2023•1 hr 37 min
Oh it's you again.. welcome back! So today it's always sunny in Philadelphia again, this time we're (loosely) talking about the first episode of Season 4, Mac and Dennis: Manhunters (2008). Jake found in it a certain brilliance, by which I mean a glowing excuse mainly to talk about de Sade... oh, and to push his Cannibalist agenda. The cannibal appears originally as an ethnic reference, identified by the European colonist, before mushrooming into a particularly nasty (and suspiciously useful) me...
Apr 14, 2023•1 hr 53 min
Welcome back dear listener! 5 Star Tossers grudgingly presents: Shakespeare's 1596 play The Merchant of Venice ! And boy do the grudges flow in this one: Marx, Jew, Woman, Lacan... even Peggy Kamuf and Beyoncé were pretty miffed by the end there. Capitalism is of course (grudgingly) on the table, since both place and time are almost unanimously hailed as the cradle of global capitalism. But Christianity too, insofar as the play deals in the lives, loves, hatreds and pains of those that lived-out...
Mar 26, 2023•1 hr 58 min
We have a really special episode for you today. Sagi has been temporarily banished, and we replaced him with the absolutely brilliant Alicia. Our cultural object this time around looks at the way Zoomers (Gen Z) relate to to sex. Some people claim they are not having enough of it, and some Zoomers claim that sex scenes in movies are non-consensual invasions of their innocence. Throughout the episode, we assert the impossibility of treating sex as an act without boundaries, transgression, and int...
Mar 01, 2023•1 hr 31 min
We are back this week with a barage of Freudian theories and crisp, clean-sounding microphones! We discuss the movie "The Menu "from the vantage point of Freud's structural metapsychology and his diagnostic distinctions between hysteric and obsessive. For those who want a refresher on the relation between Id, Superego, and Ego, speed ahead to about 1:12. Andrew gives a wonderful summary of the obsessive's desire to become pure object and reduce everything to shit. And Sagi, winning for himself t...
Feb 07, 2023•2 hr 4 min
Hello listener, and welcome! This episode got a little bit out of hand. Treating of the MCU's metaphysical maneuvering, we had to go deep into the bad air of ressentiment... Availing ourselves to Nietzsche, which sounds reasonable, had unfortunately gone to Sagi's head, who proceeded to channel the poor moustached genius throughout. And then a hammer became involved... Unfortunate. We are reverse-engineering perhaps the most cathartic moment of the MCU (phase 3 at least) -- where, in Avengers: E...
Jan 28, 2023•1 hr 31 min
Perhaps geared to the most niche part of our listener, in this episode we discuss the bruising and celebrated video game stylings of the company From Software and its auteur creative designer Hidetaka Miyazaki. Jesus returns for the proceedings! Specifically, we discuss the moral imperative YouTubers praise in games such as Elden Ring, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Dark Souls I, II, III. These games are fucking hard, and there is no way to change the difficulty level. But that's just the kind of pedag...
Jan 06, 2023•1 hr 48 min
Why can't we all just side with one another in the pain of the signifier? Hello again listener! From the flu-ish depths comes at you an almost contagion-free installment of the Tossers, this time dedicated to Merriam-Webster's 2022 'Word of the Year': Gaslighting. We also have a first-time guest, Andrew, a master summarizer of whom we are still in awe. We introduce the term through a rough semantic history, from its humble beginnings to its humiliating present. We tried to watch the 1944 movie a...
Dec 26, 2022•1 hr 39 min
In this episode we discuss the new horror film Barbarian. Marx Grudge returns as we think about the horrors of private property, specifically the home and real estate. We reference a blog post by the scholar Jason Read to follow this track, while trying our best to tie the thread of property relations to he other thread that runs through the movie: sexual difference and its constituent violence. These threads did not come together so neatly, maybe that's because Freud has a Marx Grudge just like...
Dec 10, 2022•1 hr 40 min•Season 3Ep. 4
Hello faithful listener! This Tossers episode tries to air-out the particularly pungent elements in the bad-air Ressentiment of 'Inceldom.' The incel, in our approach, may indicate the site of real pain and therefore allow insight for the very real crisis of heterosexual masculinity, its burning need of transvaluing behaviors that society can no longer abide. Certainly not for the faint of heart, or the trigger-happy. Now just pop a red pill and listen We talk about the fantasy of authentic, non...
Nov 29, 2022•1 hr 42 min•Season 3Ep. 3
They say that one of the high-society ladies that was familiar with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (and his character) said, after he died, that he was an intriguing madman. In this episode, we delve head first into Nathan Fielder's foldy-folds, whether torture chambers, traps, or some choice slices of life (if you look there you can see Nathan's symptom holding the machete). Between the sketch(y) comedy and HBO's NDAs, our discussion seems to oscillate from wondering what makes the joke, to who's made t...
Sep 11, 2022•1 hr 59 min•Season 3Ep. 2
Once again, we had to shove way too many words into our title, but we swear, we touch on all of these figures in our long awaited return from Summer Break. Cutting into David Cronenberg's new film "Crimes of the Future," we append ourselves to Paul Preciado's Testo Junkie and Jacques Derrida's Beast and Sovereign: Seminar I . An overarching question we ask is whether this film can be a strident affirmation of Trans Politics if it stages the growth of new hormones and new organs without studying ...
Aug 23, 2022•1 hr 46 min•Season 3Ep. 1
In this episode we discuss the 2011 Quentin Dupieux film Rubber . It's the story of a killer tire. Jake suggested this movie after reading Eugenie Brinkema's affect-breaking book Life-Destroying Diagrams . She is all about the horror of form or the form of horror. The thing is, Sagi and Jack found the movie pointless--but isn't that the point of having a tire (a circle, a hole) be the star of the show? We discuss Brinkema, spectatorship, and general questions about taste on this road trip. Stars...
May 11, 2022•1 hr 27 min•Season 2Ep. 8
Hello everyone! You're still here?! This podcast we're discussing and dissecting Tiger, a 2021 HBO mini-series about the rise and Fall of Tiger Phallus.. sorry, I mean Tiger Woods . Tiger's superhuman abilities are analyzed from an Oedipus Complex angle, leading us to speculate about how Earl (and his wife) had tweaked its mechanism to create the perfect golfing machine; the kind that plays golf in a manner closer to that of a machine or a person in the throes of a PTSD symptom. Something simila...
Apr 30, 2022•1 hr 35 min•Season 2Ep. 7
Oh boy. Jack introduced us to To Catch A Predator. So we try to define Perverted Justice, which is the name of the STING company that catches the predators. Jesus makes a cameo, there's some Derrida, and a whole bunch of Americana sanctimony. We try not to spend too much time imitating Chris Hansen's voice. https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9
Apr 10, 2022•1 hr 21 min•Season 2Ep. 6
In this slightly longer episode we tackle Gillian Flynn's and David Fincher's Gone Girl (2014), as a heteronormative woman's violent breakaway from a 'type' that she feels pulled towards in her marriage - unusual, impolite, homicidal, spectacular. Channeling Valerie Solanas' Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM) - allowing this monstrosity to unfold on its own terms - reveals an inversion to existing 'types' and power dynamics in modern western heteronormative marriages. The male's distance-fantasy,...
Mar 26, 2022•1 hr 49 min•Season 2Ep. 5
We thought to explore various kill-shots in the video arena. Come one come all and listen as serious discussions of Freud's death-drive and Japanese Orientalism devolve into a mayhem of body parts and Semen. We tried to go beyond the pleasure principle, where no man had gone before, but some of us gripped firmly unto the edge and would not release. It all spun out of control Pervs R' Us style. Jake had a blast though. Pun?.. What pun?! https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages...
Mar 11, 2022•1 hr 29 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Sagi introduces us to the world of scambaiting, where YouTube content creators scam scammers. We discuss the dubious ethics of these scambaiters and compare it to the Hacker Ethos of free information. We defend the honor of the Indian scammers who get scammed and the Grandmas who these scambaiters often pretend to be. We also fess up about some scams we have fallen for. There's lots of Marx Grudge and Beast and Sovereign here, Enjoy! https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i...
Feb 22, 2022•1 hr 27 min•Season 2Ep. 3
In this glorious installment we will be continuing our actor/acting thematic, this time thinking of Franz Kafka's 1922 short story Ein Hungerkünstler . Slog along as we tarry a bit over the slim, somewhat Marxist contribution of the character's Pathos with regards to the reactionary-soporific functions of the Theater. But then, rejoice with the tragic overabundance of life, as we broach the fracking of Mount Sinai, interrogate false prophets of Dionysian intoxication, and Babel the shiznit out o...
Feb 14, 2022•1 hr 29 min•Season 2Ep. 2
The Tossers obsess over the final scene of a Seinfeld episode (Season 6, Episode 23), where an actor bombs on stage and begs the audience to let her start again. Why, we wonder, is it impossible for her to start again? Why is the audience so cruel? Maybe she can start again? Along the way, we discuss Shakespeare, Hannah Gadsby, Aristotle's Catharsis, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, and Nietzsche's fear that actors now rule the world. https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wn...
Jan 24, 2022•1 hr 18 min•Season 2Ep. 1
5 Star Tossers throw up their first video game toss, focusing on Bioshock Infinite, the 3rd installation of the Bioshock series. They debate whether there's racism in the way the Black uprising is portrayed. They also get lost in the pleasure they take in gameplay, wondering whether a video game's story is all that important. https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9
Dec 14, 2021•1 hr 29 min•Season 1Ep. 10
Tossers turn to Julia Kristeva's abject to think about how repellant Megan Fox actually is in the 2009 film Jennifer's Body. Does she upset the hipster male gaze of the band Low Shoulder, or does she confirm its innermost secret? We also reference the SNL clip called The Librarian with Margot Robbie. https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9
Nov 16, 2021•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 9
5 Star Tossers throw some Hegel and Isaiah Berlin at you, in the name of freedom. There's Positive Freedom, Negative Freedom, Absolute Freedom, and then the Good Ole' U.S. of A brand: don't tread on my property. Oh yeah, this is all framed around the Always Sunny in Philadelphia Episode entitled "Charlie Goes America All Over Everybody's Asses" https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9
Nov 05, 2021•1 hr 24 min•Season 1Ep. 8
5 Star Tossers try to make sense of the Paul Verhoeven "Masterpiece of Shit" "Showgirls." Did we? We sure wrestled over it, and we churned out some humiliating memories, some Marxist feminist theories à la Silvia Federici, a hypothesis about the difference between satirizing violence and satirizing sex, a theory of the hoax, and we introduce Deleuze's cinematic concept "the crystalline element." https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9
Oct 25, 2021•1 hr 31 min•Season 1Ep. 7
The Five Star Tossers joyfully lambaste the Béla Tarr movie The Turin Horse. This leads them to think about what happens when you try to mash Marxist and Nietzschean ideas together. https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9
Oct 19, 2021•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 6
This week The 5 Star Tossers look at the cultural phenomenon that is the Golden Buzzer from America's Got Talent. We do a shallow deep dive into Kant's Critique of Judgment to think about the Christian humanism at the heart of any universal celebration of beauty and talent. We also introduce for the first time our Star il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais, so expect some Saussurean talk about fracking the signifier. Also, if you want to meet someone who thinks Susan Boyle can't sing, we somehow mana...
Oct 19, 2021•1 hr 32 min•Season 1Ep. 5
We look at Werner Herzog's fascinating film Grizzly Man. Herzog compiles and analyzes the footage Timothy Treadwell filmed when he traveled to Alaska each summer for 13 years to live with Grizzly bears. We think about the colonizing tendencies in both Herzog and Treadwell, and discuss, via Jacques Derrida, the fabled relation between man and animal. Jake's Databyss notes: https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9...
Oct 19, 2021•1 hr 47 min•Season 1Ep. 4
We discuss Eyes Wide Shut from a psychoanalytic angle. Specifically, we discuss the closing line of the movie by way Jacques Lacan's provocative statement that "There is No Sexual Relation." Here is the link to Jake's Databyss notes for the Podcast: https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9
Oct 19, 2021•1 hr 39 min•Season 1Ep. 3
