Listener Mail: Kuleshov Kul-Aid

series on Tumbleweeds. Yes, now I have to say, and this is something that you pointed out, we have fewer messages than we usually have, so I'm going to try and speak very slowly and Okay, if I pause enough, we'll be able to go thirty minutes or so here. Oh oh, that's a brilliant idea. Excuse me, that is a brilliant idea. All right, I don't know if we can sustain this. I'll probably go back to normal speed here. They can easily defeat us by just going to the

two x speed or whatever on playback. That's right, they're just and then but that then we'll cause like some sort of whiplash if we go super slow and then we start speeding up again, and we don't want to We don't want to do that. We don't wanna do that to the listeners. Folks. Have we annoyed you enough today already? Or all right, let's jump into it. This one comes to us from Bill. It's titled Tumbleweeds, Bill Rights.

Your show has edutained me for years, but I am shocked that of all the fascinating topics that you have covered, it is the seed spreading of dead flora that has

brought in the most email. I am in southern Utah, which has a huge supply of Russian thistle that rolls around the area, gets caught in the dust devils, which elevate them hundreds of feet above the terrain, and of course clog up drainage, ditches, slat canyons, and even damages cars if the central quote unquote trunk of the bush is large enough to damage the frail plastic of modern cars. Some of these beasts can reach eight to ten feet

in diameter. My job throwing people off of cliffs keeps me surrounded by these mesmerizing rolling nuisances as I hike and climb through remote desert areas. Of all the places where you don't want to tangle with these are in some of the slot canyons of Lake Powell. There are places where one has to wade and swim through a hundred yards of lake soaked tumbleweeds that could easily be five to ten feet thick from the lake bottom to just below the surface. They quickly sink, but take quite

a while to fully break down. This leaves years, if not decades, of submerged spiky residue to contend with. Keep up your amazing content and delivery, Bill, Wow, what a hellish scene you have described, so like slot canyons that have water at the bottom, and then that water is just full of like years of build up of of slowly rotting tumbleweeds. Yeah, I love I love this detail. We're learning more and more about the devastation wrought by

the Russian thistle. I'm assuming the job of throwing people off of cliffs here is some sort of like bungee cord related venture, bass jumping or something. Yeah, I don't know. I hope this is not a confession from a serial killer. In our He's just a crazed desert dweller that throws people off of cliffs whenever he finds them, but he does not clarify, so we'll just have to assume the best quantum state. All right, are you ready for this

message from Lauren on our Vault episodes about mushroom foraging. Oh? Yes, okay, Lauren says, Hello, Robert and Joe. Uh, And then she starts off by saying some some very nice things about the show and talks about how she started listening to us this past December and has been exploring a bunch of our episodes ever since then. So Lauren begins after

listening to the second Vault episode about mushroom foraging. The information about the two types of fruit flies made me think about the times in my youth when I very occasionally played Super Mario on the Nintendo sixty four, the one where you jump through paintings to enter worlds with goals to complete um. Now, for people who haven't revisited the Mushroom episodes recently, we should probably do a quick

refresher on what the deal with the different foraging styles was. Basically, the idea here is that research has identified a gene found in a variety of animals called p r KG one and found that in UH some very different animals, though a lot of the researches in fruit flies, which variant of this gene you have, which p r KG one allele you have seems to correlate with preferences in foraging behavior, and in fruit flies at least they identify

two distinct types of foragers that are called sitters and rovers, and these two styles have various implications, but the simplified version is that sitters tend to be more conservative in their foraging patterns, so they will stick close to the boundaries of established foraging areas and they have shorter paths

of exploration, whereas rovers tend to be more adventurous. They tend to explore foraging environments with long search paths and a greater tendency to dive right into the exposed center of open foraging areas. So there are probably a lot of implications to this, but it seems at least possible

that this may have something to do with risk. Aversion right that sitters, by sticking to more established foraging regions and sticking close to sheltered boundary areas of of foraging zones UH, they take fewer risks, but of course they also suffer opportunity costs compared to the rovers, which may be you know, taking more risks by just sort of venturing right out into open space. But they're also more

likely to discover new food sources by doing that. Uh. There is some research to indicate that possessing different variants of a foraging associated gene might also be correlated with similar behavior preferences and humans. Though that that's the kind of assumption that I'm always a little bit cautious about, So I'd want really good research basis before before going whole hog on that on that foraging gene type idea

in humans. But anyway, Uh, to come back to Laura, and I remember she was talking about Super Mario sixty four, which I I remember that game fondly. I love jumping into the paintings too. You know, I don't think I ever played this one, but I had to look it up to see which one it was. I'm vaguely familiar with Mario super Mario sixty four, but I was surprised to see that it's apparently popped up in different peer

reviewed medical studies. Uh. Yeah, yeah, where they'll have they'll be testing something or another studying some something or another end they will have test subjects play super Mario sixty four. Now, I'm not sure if there's something special about Mario sixty four uh that that makes it the ideal thing to make your test subjects do, but fascinating. Nonetheless, well, it's

a rather magical game. And you know, I wouldn't be surprised if if somebody out there at some point found that that a little bit of Super Mario sixty four was was good for what ails you, at least to maybe in dispelling certain types of dysphoria or something. I don't know, but yeah, So it's it's a game where you jump through paintings to go into different like sub worlds, and so so Lauren picks back up in her original email.

When I'd enter a painting world for the first time or for the first time in a while, I would always walk or swim the perimeter of the world to get a sense of the boundaries of the terrain. I wanted to know which directions were worth traveling in, and also, if I was going to search the entire terrain, I thought it best to cover the small pockets in full before expanding my search, so that I didn't have to return later or repeatedly unnecessarily. I did this with Zelda

as well. After listening to this episode, I got to wondering about the expectations of video game developers. If they anticipate their players to have a quote, run into the center and aim for the biggest attraction or enemy sort of mindset, or if they expect players to behave in

other ways. I wondered if for certain games, I was being set up for success or failure not based on my intelligence, but on the preferences and possible genetics of the video game creator who established these rules to the game without considering the possibility that people hunt and gather in different ways. Thanks again, Lauren, Yeah, I think this is really interesting, Lauren, because you know, I don't know what I think about a how strongly determined a single

foraging gene could be on the behaviors of humans. But uh, for whatever reason, I think I am very much a sitter fly when it comes to virtual environments and video games. I you know, when I'm playing a video game, I hate having to run into the middle of previously unexplored territory. I'm I'm I'm a cautious explorer. I like to understand the landscape before I enter. I survey it from from the sheltered periphery, look at it from high ground, and

so forth. I mean, I guess different games, Um, they reward different types of behavior, or they can. Some games are certainly gonna maybe be broader in their approach and play tested in different ways to where you can you can take multiple strategies. Um. But this is a great question I'd love to hear from anyone out there with more familiarity with the game design world. It does remind me a little bit of of the situation with if I remember correctly, with Fallout seventy six when it came out.

I think the idea with that was they were like, all right, we're gonna get all these people into this virtual shared all out world and they're just gonna fight each other, and they're gonna have a great time fighting each other. And it turns out like most people playing it didn't actually want to fight each other. They wanted

to do other things. And so there was a period of time during which I was I was playing the game where uh, even even though the game wanted you to kill each other, people were tending to do the opposite, and they were trying to do something more communal. And then eventually the game uh developers, the game masters kind of catch up with with that, uh and and kind of shift the shape of the virtual environment to meet the way people wanted to actually play the game. It's interesting.

I never played that game. The only thing I know You've mentioned it a couple of times, but I think the only other thing I've seen about it was that for some reason people were mad about it, like was it buggy or something? Um oh, I'm trying to even remember. It may have been buggy at first, I mean, not not catastrophically. So I enjoyed playing I must have played it pretty steadily for for over a year. It was kind of a kind of a comfort food for me

for a little bit there. Um, I gotta say, I'd rather enjoy a buggy game sometimes, like a lot of pleasure out of that. Yeah. I mean a lot of these bugs become memes, right, yeah. Yeah. But I would love to hear more more about this because I guess nowadays you tend to have games that are created by by large groups, and hopefully those groups will be linked diverse enough in their mindset to where somebody at some point will be like, well, hey, what if you don't

want to run into the middle of this room. What if you want to you know, play more like a rogue or something. Uh, should we make space for that to happen? But then I wonder if that it was was less likely during the era of you know, more like a soul developer on a video game. M Yeah, I wonder. Then again, I guess there might also be just different types of games, uh, that that appeal more to the sitter type personality versus the rover type personality.

Like I mean, there are certain types of games that there are a ton of in our generation that I just don't ever enjoy at all, like the like the military shooter type games that hold like no appealed for me. But it seems like maybe they'd be more appealing to somebody with kind of more of a rover personality who likes to just run in and start shooting at anything

that moves. Yeah. Yeah, though though even in those games I remember, you know, back in the days of of Doom, like the original Doom and the original Quake and those games, uh, you know, you'd have people who wanted to to to to camp out to just hang out in one spot on the map and then just snipe people when they moved in. Um, and I think some of these games,

like like Half Life. Eventually caught up with that and said, okay, well, let's let's make sure they're different roles for these different types of players within a given like death match situation. Oh yeah, I guess, I guess they're usually you probably can tell I don't play multiplayer games very much, but they're usually like different player classes in those games. Right, yeah, all right, should we move on to the next one here? Sure, let's go. Uh. This one comes from Brenda and this

has to do with their episode on the Clushov Effect. Hi, Robert and Joe. I'm a long time listener and love your show. I'm currently recovering from COVID and as such have had an unusual amount of free time as I cannot go to work. I've been using this time to catch up on my favorite podcasts, and yours always takes the top spot. I just finished listening to the Kulashov Effect episodes, and the thing that came to mind for

me was memes. We have a whole culture of intentionally taking expressions and clips out of context and matching them with whatever images or blurbs fit what we would like to express the popular woman screaming and a cat name comes to mind. Perhaps it is not a perfect connection, but it seems to me that in the age of social media, the edit is more important than the actor. Thanks Brenda, Yeah, this is a good point. Uh, I

don't know. So there's one big difference I think with the the the alleged Coolershov effect in the in the origin as you can experiment, which was supposedly that it was like an expressionless face on that the actor was using, and then that was paired with whatever. Most I think meme faces are not usually expressionless. They're they're like, I

don't know, they've got some kind of directed content. But then you fill in a blank in the IMPLI in the sentence that's implied by the meme with whatever the subject of the meme is, you know, the thing it's reacting to or the text you put on it, and so forth. Yeah, I'm thinking I'm instantly thinking of a lot of these meme faces where where yeah, it's pretty

obvious what the emotional impact is supposed to be. A lot of times it's this versus that I guess the woman making the the disgusted face and then the you know, considering it face, or it's Drake saying no, he doesn't want this and then saying yes, he does want this. So it's there's not a lot of ambiguity. Maybe i'm i'm, i'm, i'm. You know, I'm just not thinking of a good example.

But I off the top of my head, I'm not thinking of any um any any meme faces that leave a lot of room to imagine what that individual thinks of the thing that they're supposedly looking at or considering.

But I do think, nevertheless, there's really something going here because the meme culture, I think connects more to the coolest Shavian vision of filmmaking, where you would just have these sort of like endlessly rearrangeable building blocks that are then the the editor uses them to make meaning and endless combinations. So I mean, and memes are kind of

that way. It's not so much that you know, you're seeing neutral faces that you're reading expressions onto because of the context, but you are seeing things that are just treated as building blocks that can be repurposed to any situation. Yeah, alright, this next message is also about the Coolest jav Effect. This is from somebody. I'm sorry, I don't know how to pronounce your aim. It's spelled d I O N.

That might be dion or dion. I'm not sure. I'll try, uh Dion Dion says Dear Rob and Joe and stuff to blow your mind crew, massive fan of the show. I just had to make this contribution to your discussion of the Coolest Shov Effect. I hope you find it useful or interesting. It's worth considering the role of another editing element of the modern film, and that is sound.

Cooleshov's work was done before fully synchronized sound, Although it is worth noting that music almost always played a role in cinema in the West, it's commonly cited that music was used to cover up the sound of the noisy film projectors of the day. Oh yeah, I can only imagine what kind of clattering racket those things would have made.

But the email goes on. But beyond that, there are many examples of sound being used in the same way we use modern score, that is, to influence or manipulate an audiences perceptions or emotions and ultimately drive the film narrative. Michelle Chillon and this is the name of a French filmmaker and composer, UH talks about a concept called added value. Added value is where images on screen and sound combined to create new meaning. This meaning is greater, different, or

more complex than the original meaning of each part. In Isolation and then Deon gives the example of how you can use like atmospheric sound paired with a shot of an apartment interior to set very different kinds of scenes. Like you might hear you might hear kind of birds twittering and breeze blowing, in which case you assume this apartment is is somewhere in kind of like a peaceful

countryside setting. Or you might hear like loud traffic and horns honking and and the bustle of people and voices, in which case you assume that the Uh, the apartment is somewhere in the city and it's urban and things are happening and busy. Dion writes, each scenario sets the scene for a completely different narrative while the picture remains the same. Actually, sound does this in a very economical way,

very quickly, without even drawing our awareness to it. I recommend Shann's book Audio Vision, Sound on Screen, since you're interested in this nerdier side of film. This was published in English in n s Owen's work corresponds with the availability of videotape, which simplified the repetitive study of filming material in a classroom setting. Oh that's a funny detail.

I don't know if I've ever put that together before, but I wonder if I wonder how the the advent of home video changed trends in film criticism and film theory, just because it suddenly would become so much easier to rewatch films and seen from films. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I certainly remember as a kid the films that I loved, and of course I feel like oftentimes when you're a kid, you do watch things over and over again. But I would just I would put things on like slow motional

loops when possible. You know, it would be like the melting scenes and raiders of the Lost Art. And it wasn't enough to just watch it once. You know, you had to slow it down. You you had to freeze frame and all of this. So it's you know, thank goodness, those effects who really saw it watching that Nazi turned to soup. It made you the man you are today. But yeah, I know, I know exactly what you're talking about.

But if I had had, you know, if I wanted to, and I had more of an appreciation for for the you know, the actual you know, art and craft of sentiment at the time, that's the kind of thing I could have looked to. I could have I could have slowed it down instead of then and asked myself, well, what is um you know, what is spiel we're actually doing here? How is he how is he pulling me in with this particular sequence, how is it cut? And

then how might I recreate the same thing? Absolutely? But but to come back to the email, Dion rights to bring this back to Kolashov's idea of the manipulation of an image. I used to teach a subject about film sound and we would do an exercise that was always really effective. It went like this. You would choose a short section of film, you choose music from a variety of genres like horror, romantic, comedy, drama, et cetera, and then you'd play back the scene with the new music

and discuss the results. Simple but effective. We would do this in groups and I found over the years that the driving to the Bates Motel scene in Hitchcock's Psycho from nineteen sixty was very effective for this exercise. Uh. And then Dion provides a link to the scene which I did a little experiment with. I paired up the Psycho scene with with Janet Lee with the silver shamrock music from Season of the Witch, and it did indeed produce a different effect, though I don't know if it

was uh. I mean, I guess the effect it produced was was well within the wheelhouse of the movie Psycho already, would you say that she appeared more irritated than yes, yes, or maybe I would say that honestly, the idea that came to my head was she was afraid that she found herself hating her own children because they were singing this song so much. Yeah, yeah, I can. I not try this myself, but just looking at it, I'm imagining like some of the stuff you could drop in, uh.

You know, you could certainly drop in some some other forms of tense music. You could also drop in something that's maybe a little more emotional, you know, like I'm thinking some some sort of modern I don't know, Lanta del rey sort of music, you know, and it would take on I think a different vibe. Well, I like what Dion says, which is quote. I was always surprised

by the new possibilities without going into them all. I recall watching the scene to a disco track, and this had the scene taking on the sense of a cheesy romantic comedy. All of a sudden, Janet Lee's nuanced performance is turned into simply before date jitters. I can totally see that, and I love it that that. I think it works. Dion says, of course, the face remains the same, but we attribute different meaning to it, as per the

Coolishev effect. I found the temporal nature of the results interesting to some music choices would give the sense of leaving something behind, while some would create tension about the future, like the original score. And then Dion encourages us to take a few moments to try it for ourselves, like

the kind Diarity described this part. I thought was really interesting that certain certain pairings would cause you to see the emotion on her face as reactive to something that already happened, and others would cause you to see it as anticipatory. Yeah, I mean, I didn't actually play it. But I've been watching it the whole time, and I was just a running APAs dancing Queen through my head while I'm looking at it, and I can I can sort of get, you know the point here about like

the sort of the disco vibes. How that would potentially steer interpretation, Like it turns the the paranoia that she has about the fact that she stole all this money in the movie and is wondering, is worried about what's going to happen, It turns that into that is what happened in the scene, right, didn't she take a bunch of money and run away? Yes? Yeah, but anyway, yeah, it turns that into like being worried about what people are going to think about her at the party or something. Anyway,

the email goes on. Perhaps it odds to all of this. There are quite a number of studies that displayed the primacy of vision over sound. White noise is regarded as more pleasant when associated with the picture of a waterfall, for example, and red trains are louder. And then there there are links to a couple of citations for this abe at All nineteen uh in the study called the Effects of Visual information on the impression of environmental sounds and then fostil at all in two thousand four audio

visual interactions in loudness evaluation. But then finally Dion sites something called the McGurk effect. The McGurk effect is an example of this idea of visual dominance. Uh. This is an interesting and persistent allusion, credited to cognitive psychologists McGurk and McDonald In nineteen seventy six, robbers a visual example I'd link to that you can check out for yourself,

but I'll try to explain it. So, if you watch video of somebody making a sound repeatedly, the the example I found was a man just saying bob bob bah like a sheep bh, over and over and uh. And something very strange happens if you continue playing the same audio but substitute in video of the guy looking like he's making an f sound with his mouth, so it would be fa fa fa, even though the audio doesn't change.

At least on me, I absolutely hear fa fa fa, even though technically the audio is the same bob bah bah as it was before. Interesting and and the at least subjectively, the effect is profound on me, Like I I absolutely hear faughfafa, It's as if that's what he

was actually saying. Anyway, Dion finishes up by saying that they're working towards their their PhD doing research in sound design of film dialogue and ends up saying some very nice things about the show and uh in saying I love the stuff and could talk about it all, but I'll stop now. Warm regards Dion, Well, thanks, this was a really great email. Yeah, yeah, I'm I'm gonna just busy myself now with playing different different works of music

over that psycho scene. I think Janet Lee's face and the Psycho scene is yet another good example of a face that is ambiguous but not neutral. You could you could read multiple things into it, though I guess it would be hard to imagine that she looks happy, but you could read multiple different kinds of negative emotion into her face. All right, let's do Let's do one more here. This one comes to us from Morgan. Morgan rights, Hey, fellas,

love the show and I hope you're doing well. I just wanted to address your comments regarding the Witcher drawing his sword. While they don't appear this way in the games, and it's not explicitly addressed in the books. In the show the TV show um the scabbard is not continuous, and that it essentially just hold the tip of the sword in place and a strap secures it towards the hilt. A scabbard design this way would allow the blade to move independently of the linked scabbard until it clears the

strap at the top. Also, the books usually point out that Garrel loosens the strap on his scabbard when he may need to draw, allowing for further mobility. Additionally, and semi related, only in the games does the Witcher carry two swords at once. Typically, if he's carrying a sword on his back, it's just the one he needs to use for the current foe. His other remains in the

carrying case on the saddle. I've attached an image below which shows the scabbard and yes, there it is all right now if you're totally confused by this, I think this person is responding to me in a previous listener male saying that the witcher sword would not work. But I was talking about in the video games, because in the video games he wears his sword in a full scabbard. It's like a solid scabbard encasing the blade, but on

his back. And I was just pointing out, you can't draw a sword like that because your arm is not long enough to get it out of the scabbard if it's on your back. But so on the show it sounds like they've got to work around for that by saying, well, the scabbard isn't actually solid. It's just like the tip point is solid, and then there's a strap, so he'd have to loosen the strap and then pull it out a little bit and then he can just like he doesn't have to pull it out the full length because

it's not actually solid all the way around. Yeah, this makes me want to do something on swords again. I know we've covered swords and blades and weapons to a certain degree in the past. I know you love swords man, Well, I mean you know a movie with a good sword scene, Oh yeah, good sword fight. A good sword fight's hard to find an emotional sword fight. It tells a story. Um,

I do vaguely remember you. You you get into like the history of various um styles of sword play, and it's it gets pretty fascinating, like they are all these sort of distinct martial art forms that in some cases are you know, partially forgotten but also easy to you know, to to to not recognize when you just see an

illustration of the image. Especially, I'm thinking some of these, you know, very large swords, you just sort of think, well, you just go up there and you start swinging it around, right, But but no, there's a particular a particular form, there's a particular way that you would use this weapon effectively in combat. Maybe that's an episode we do one on great swords, you know, okay, really big swords and what

what circumstances do they make sense? And then how often do we see that same logic applied to to video games or scenes and fantasy movies. All right, man, I'm there, all right, all right, We're gonna go ahead and call it there. But obviously we'd love to hear from everybody. If you have thoughts on anything we've discussed here today, we can talk about it in a future Listener mail episode. We do these every Monday. Our core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

On Wednesday we do a short form artifact episode and on Friday, that's when we do weird out cinema. That's our time to set aside those serious matters and just discuss a weird film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at

contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.