Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
And this is Joe McCormick.
And today's episode feels like a perfect fit in a number of ways. For starters. We've been discussing mystery cults on our core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and the concept of an imagistic religion has been key to our discussions. There infrequent high sensory rights of passage, and I feel like today's film matches up with that
concept on a couple of levels. Furthermore, to understand, we potentially have more eyes on the podcast feed this week, and it seemed proper to maybe lean a little more into science fiction. Plus, we've also been saving this one for a week when we had maybe a little less time. This is one of the shorter pictures we've looked at on Weird House Cinema. It's only a half hour long, 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 Luccio 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.
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 very last couple of minutes where it got super weird, and it almost felt like, you know, that level of weirdness was being held back for much of the run time.
I think that is not something you could say about Quest.
Now.
This film is all abstract and surreal weirdness. It is not held back by the necessities of for the most part, the necessities of genre or plot or character, or any of the conventional trappings of narrative filmmaking. It is instead more like an initiation into a great mystery.
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 shortened life spans.
Yes, yes, we have a chosen one, we have a quest, and yeah, it's quite an adventure.
But so with the plot itself being quite simple, what is left to fill in the kind of uniqueness of the movie is the series of images that it supplies. This is a movie that is about creating weird scenes, and I really like the the variable tone of of the the sort of settings that we get. Because there were sort of natural settings. We see our hero wandering through rocky landscapes and you know, mountain mountain passes and
planes and things like that. But then also we get not even artificial but almost geometric, like abstract landscapes that couldn't really exist in reality. They're they're like illustrations from an mc escher drawing.
Yeah, yeah, increasingly surreal landscapes and environments. You know, you go from from some settings that have like a very like dark fantasy, Sword and Sandals kind of feel into settings that feel like they have apps been stripped from tron somehow.
Yes, yes, it starts a tour and ends esher.
Yeah all right, my elevator pitch for this one, I just dug up a quick Bible verse, teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
Ah.
Yeah, that'll come up later.
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.
Is this the one?
One day from now, you'll be a grown boy, two or three, young man, five, middle aves seven old. In eight days, you'll stop and die.
Listen to our heart's race. Listen to your own heart race.
We are locked away in the world where our lives speaks through time. In eight days, no time to see you, to feel, to know.
It's time. Ah, Now the teaching begins.
Listen to them, learn quickly, listen to.
Them all right now? If you want to watch Quest from nineteen eighty four before proceeding here. Well, DVD and VHS releases have apparently been available. There's some evidence I've found that you can order some sort of a DVD of this movie, but for the most part, I can't tell that it has benefited from a high quality physical
media release, at least not yet. Hopefully there's some sort of collected short films of Saul in the Lane Bass disc that will come out in the future, and when it does, we will certainly promote it here on Weird House Cinema. As of right now, you can easily find this film on YouTube. There's at least one version that claims to be some level of remastering. I'm never sure how that works when you have a unofficial remastering of films,
so I'm not completely certain on that. I think that Eternal Family, which you can find an Eternal dot TV, I believe they have offered it in the past, but I'm not sure that it is currently offered, but check out Eternal Family either way, their catalog often matches up
with Weird House Cinema tastes. But I'm confident that if you were interested in watching Quest, out there, you can find a stream of it somewhere, and then hopefully down the road we'll get that high quality release that we all clearly need.
All right, Should we talk about the connections?
Yeah, let's start at the top with the directors and producers. It's Saul and Elaine Bass, husband and wife design power couple. We discussed saw Bass previously in our episode on nineteen seventy four's Phase four. That was his only his slash there. I may go back and forth from referring to him and referring to he and his wife. They work together, I believe on most of these projects after a certain point, but she wasn't always credited right at there at the top.
On Quest they are co directors and are credited as such. But yeah, Phase four was their only feature length directorial credit. A film that, yeah, we might describe as the two thousand and one a space odyssey of ant movies, an increasingly weird man versus Nature film that reaches a fever pitch of an ending and its theatrical cut, but absolutely explodes in a cinematic acid trip if you watch the original ending, which is even weirder and stranger.
Yeah, the spoiler for this movie is that humanity is sort of being, would you say, competed with by hyper intelligent ants, and the ants win in the end, and when the ants, when there's an ending where it's I recall, it's sort of implied that humans aren't all just like killed by the ants. Like life goes on, but life is increasingly completely incomprehensible because we are unable to understand the intelligence or desire or what is meaningful to the ant powers that are governing our lives.
Yeah, it's kind of unclear if it's a downer ending or a happy ending, because it's that surreal and out there, like it's beyond your human expectations of good and bad endings.
You cannot imagine an ant ruled world. You just can't even get there now.
Saalbass lived nineteen twenty through nineteen ninety six. Elaine Bass was born in nineteen twenty seven, and as of this recording is still around now. We talked a bit about sal Bass on our episode regarding Phase four again. He was the title sequence slash title design guy of his era. 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 from the mid fifties all the way through the mid nineties. We're talking about the likes of the Seven Year Itch, Vertigo, Psycho, Spartacus, West Side Story, Seconds, which we covered on Weird House Cinema, Broadcast News, Big Goodfellas, Kate Beer, and Casino. The credits to Mad Men on TV this was an homage to
his work. He did logos for a number of big name companies throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and he also did some pretty famous movie posters as well, including the aforementioned films as well as Stanley Kubrick's The Shining I consulted a book for a little more detail about Saul and the Lame Bass, a book titled saw Baths, Anatomy of Film Design by Jan Christopher Horrock, which of course has a great deal to say about their approach
to art, everything from title and logo design work to of course their cinematic output. And again from about nineteen sixty onward. Elaine was his longtime creative partner who worked with him on pretty much most of these projects, so she's not again. She's not always credited earlier on, but certainly by the time of today's film, she shared official credit with her husband. Their first short film was nineteen sixty four. Is the Searching Eye, a contemplation of visual
awareness in the unseen world. This one was narrated by Vic Perrin, who recently talked about the Voice of the Outer Limits and also the Gargoyle.
The narrator at the beginning of Gargoyles and dubbed in on Bernie Casey's Gargoyle King.
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 Notes on the Popular Arts and nineteen eighties The Solar Film that was an OSCAR nominated documentary produced by Robert Redford.
About the perils of fossil fuels and the need for humanity to pivot to clean solar energy, and all of this leads up to their final film project, and that is nineteen eighty four's Quest. As Horrick relates, the origin story on this one is super interesting. So bear with me here. This is a lot. I was not expecting
it to be this rich. So this was a Japanese funded production funded by the Church of World Messianity, a new religious movement founded in nineteen thirty five by Mokichio Kata who lived eighteen eighty two through nineteen fifty five. A religious movement that promotes spiritual cleansing via the light.
WHOA, I did not expect it to take this turn.
Yeah, so apparently, as I understand it based on reading Horrock's book, here people affiliated with the church at this point. I think the Church was kind of going through like some you know, rebranding a little bit redesign, like entering a new era, and they were really taken by the Bass's design work. This work had recently been featured in a nineteen seventy nine issue of Idea, and so they approached him about creating a visionary film to play in
the church's temples and spaces. So Saul Bass apparently wasn't really all that interested in creating an overtly religious work, but was drawn to the idea of quote a purely metaphoric vision without proselytizing for the church, and quote, a positive film that doesn't view life as a prelude to disaster.
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.
That does seem to be the amazing thing about it, because they did reach an agreement here. So I think basically Saul Bass had worked with some big corporations before funding his other works and was able to keep a great deal of creative freedom over the final product. And he thought, really, I mean, it seemed like it would be kind of almost naive to think this, but he thought, well, we can do the same thing working with a religious organization.
But he was right that it seems like it basically worked out like that.
It's like when the Baptist Church of la funded Plan nine from Outer Space.
Yeah, pretty much. So, yeah, they funded this for the tune of I Believe a Million dollars was the overall budget, and again this was back in the eighties, and it does feature strong themes of light, which line up with some of the doctrines the land stand them of the church in question here, but otherwise the plot the finished film is detached from the church's teaching, so again kind of a secularization of maybe some of their core values, but in a way that doesn't lean too heavily into
preaching the gospel of this particular faith.
Kind of like if you could get a I don't know, just some mainstream Christian church to sponsor you by creating a story about sacrifice and redemption that didn't have any overtly Christian terms or ideas in it apart from the themes.
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 times a day at the church's headquarters for a period of four years.
Wow, does that beat Rocky Horror for the longest theatrical run just in terms of total number of plays?
I don't know. I mean, that would be an interesting question to actually get into. Because, of course, at the Studio ghibli Museum in Tokyo they play various short films of Miyazaki's exclusively there. It's the only place you can see most of them outside of maybe catching them at a festival or a special showing. But that being said, I don't think they're playing the same film every day,
four times a day. So, but then again, this is only a period of four years, so I don't know how many total viewings they were able to chalk up during that time. There was a read in Horror's book, though there was apparently some concern on the Japanese side here that if the film were commercialized too much, it would cause political problems for the church, which allegedly this allegedly stifled some of its reach, So there may there
might have been some tension over that fact. But still it did play in festivals, people did get to see it, people continue to see it, and again, hopefully we'll get to see some sort of proper release of it in the future.
Wow, that's really interesting.
So they agreed to the basic terms of this film, but then they still needed somebody to write it, so they reached out to legendary author Ray Bradbury, who lived nineteen twenty through twenty twelve, the author of such famous works as The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit four fifty one, The
Illustrated Man, The October Country, and so forth. He was also a successful screenwriter in his own right, having written the screenplay for the nineteen fifty six adaptation of Moby Dick, and his work was also adapted for TV and film going back to the nineteen fifties, including Jack Arnold's It Came from Outer Space in fifty three, which we may come back to in Weird House Cinema.
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 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.
I mean, I haven't seen it since I was a kid, but I remember really enjoying Gregory Peck in the adaptation from fifty six. And since Ray Bradbury did the screenplay, maybe we can do it on weird house cinema. That's enough. It's basically sci fi, so yeah, Saul and Elaine Bass reached out to Bradbury to script Quest, and Bradbury adapted
his own nineteen forty six story, Frost and Fire. Now, there were a number of changes made, apparently here, as Bradbury updated the structure of that old story for this new project. So first of all, Saul was wary of overreaching with their budget and requested that it be set on Earth, or at least an earth like world, rather than an overly alien planet. That seems like a reasonable budgetary request, though having seen the full film, I feel like we get very unearthly.
Yeah.
Yeah, at least half of it's taken place in you know, geometry textbook illustrations, not on any landscape I would recognize.
Right, So I don't feel like they really held back too much there. Also, while the original story is more hard science fiction, in the original story of the characters depleted life spans are apparently due to radiation, and they're able to depend on some sort of race memory. They have to convey the essentials of the quest, as we'll get into to each subsequent generation, Whereas the version of the story that we get in the Quest has a
more mythic vibe to it. It feels more like fantasy or sword and Sandals, but then gets increasingly stranger and more surreal.
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.
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
science fiction. Perhaps because clearly caveat, I have not read the original Bradbury story, but I get a strong hint here that Bradbury wasn't really interested in the effects of radiation human beings. It's more about issues of mortality and you know, cross generational efforts and so forth. Now, as for the human cast of Quest, there are a bunch of people in this and everyone is just bolk credited
at the end. They don't specify who plays who, and it leaves the task to your humble podcasters to try and figure out exactly who's who in this picture. We are not going to single out everyone, but I do want to mention just a few of the players here who are notable because of their work elsewhere, and my apologies to anyone that I did leave out because of this.
Multiple actors, for instance, play are chosen one our hero of the tale, because he's going to start We cover most of his life over the course of the narrative. He begins as a baby and we'll end with him as a mature adult man. But we have different actors playing him, and it's not a makeup effect.
That would have been a good choice though, if you had a baby the whole time with just makeup and the older.
Yeah, or win in both directions. You know, have like a twenty five year old actor and then age him and dage him all the way down to baby. All right. One of the early characters we encounter in this is an unnamed character that I thought of as the Elder, some sort of a wise older individual who is looking for the chosen one and finds the chosen one.
And this the monklike guy who does the palm reading on the baby at the beginning. Yeah.
This character is played by John Abbott, who lived nineteen oh five through nineteen ninety six, an English Shakespearean actor with very expressive eyes, known for roles and let's say nineteen forty eight's The Woman in White. He had an appearance on the original Star Trek, the original Lost in Space, and his other credits, of which he has a lot, include nineteen forty four Is The Mask of Demetrios. This is one I've looked at before because it's a Peter
Lorrie movie. He's also in Cry of the were Wolf from the same year, and he was the voice of Akella the Wolf in Dizzy Needs the Jungle Book back in nineteen sixty seven. All right, again, multiple actors play the chosen one, our hero, but at one point the hero is played by Noah Hathaway born nineteen seventy one. Fittingly, this is, of course, the actor who also played a Treyu in nineteen eighty four. Is the never ending story which we covered on a previous episode of Weird House Cinema.
I thought he looked familiar. Yeah, is this the day too, boy?
Yeah, this is the boy that I believe begins the journey. Right, He's passed his tests and is then setting out on the journey.
He graduated at Harvard College j L where he got an A and then he gets to go out on the journey.
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.
Oh, the hooded guy at the Egyptian temple.
Yeah, yeah, I believe this is Bill Irwin. I could be wrong on this. Bill Irwin of nineteen fourteen through twenty ten an American character actor who appeared in more than two hundred and fifty television and film roles, including the one that earned him an Emmy nomination in nineteen ninety three. Retiree Sid Fields on the sitcom Seinfeld.
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?
Just always old?
Yeah?
Yeah, it's like William Hickey late in life, you played cantankerous old men, and also early in his career. So all right. The music in this film is also a real delight. It's you'll have Maybe you can explain the music and the sound of this film better than I can, Joe, But I just think of it as a soothing, other worldly cascade of electronic bliss and intrigue.
Oh yeah, yeah, just whipped butter. Synthesizer auras a really good stuff, a lot of great you know contrast along the dynamic range. So there's a lot of synth bass that sends to me might be like a mog Taurus or something, you know, the strong, pulsing based tones, and then like synthesizer flutes that I don't know if you
really get that sound much anymore. It was a big thing in the eighties where you would you would evoke a sense of mysticism by having a synthesizer flute that I feel like if you were composing a track now and you went to put in that same synth flute voicing, it would sound really tinny and hokey to you, so you would use something else. But if you go back to these compositions that feature it, it's actually great.
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 a fitting sonic incarnation of that light.
I see what you're saying. Yeah, the music shimmers a lot. It often expands to fit. You know, It'll be very quiet at first, and then as the light floods into the scene, the music floods onto the soundtrack, and yeah, it's it's a good use of sonic textures.
So the people behind the music here, well, Elaine Bass is credited on the music. She was of not a professional singer, with some musical training prior to her design career. But then also we have credited Barrington Van Campen who I looked him up. I can find a birthday for him. But he is apparently still active on the San Francisco music scene. If you look up, if you go to the dbduo dot com, this is the website for Van
Campen and Dale LeDuc. They haven't a stick act together, and there's a They also have some some some some brief bio information about Van Campen. Van Campen is a 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.
I just looked at Wait No l a Beatles tribute band.
Yeah yeah, at one point, Uh yeah, I think, I think, and I think they still do a lot of covers of Beatles songs. I was looking at. They're still doing gigs. If you're in in San Francisco, you can go out and catch these guys. Tell them we sent you.
Please request a Beatles tune and then request the theme from Quest Now.
Prior to this film, Van Campen had worked as a musician on the Jerry Lewis film Slapstick of Another Kind, adapted from the work of Kurt Vonnegut and also co starring John Abbott, but Quest was seemingly his first credited film or TV composition. UH followed in nineteen eighty eight with a score for the film In Dangerous Company. He's also credited as composer on Faces of Death Volumes four and six in nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety six. I have not and we'll never see the Faces of Death.
My window for having watched Faces of Death has long passed. But he did some sort of work on there, and he also did a lot of work with you know, such clients as AT and T, various TV channels and film studios. So I know, I just think he did a lot of a lot of a lot of like mercenary sound work, you know. And so I don't want to I don't want to single him out for Faces of Death. Somebody had to do the music for Faces of Death might as well have been this guy.
They could have also just sourced pre existing composition.
That's true. That's true. That's very possible. And I don't know the full story on his involvement in Faces of death. So don't don't put any of that on him, because again, at the end of the day, the music in Quest is amazing and I loved every minute of it.
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 a generally pale, cold kind of color scheme that defines most of the movie until the last couple minutes. It's greens, blues, whites,
and grays. And when we first come in, also there's fog. The air is thick with fog. It's kind of swirling and suggesting a dark age in a way. And then there's a voiceover that says, before the gate was closed 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 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, with the camera at
normal eye level for a person. But then suddenly we zoom in on a little crevice in a stone facade
that looks like it's the size of a mousehole. But then you realize there are tiny stairs leading up to the crevice, and then you see a human form standing inside the doorway, and it becomes clear we're either looking at like a two inch tall human or the original reference scale you had in mind was wrong, And I think it's the latter, though there will be similar kind of scale versions that happen later in the story as well.
Yeah.
Yeah, to just a certain degree, it's like this is a an artifact of how the techniques they use to shoot it, but also it feels fittingly surreal in this picture as well.
Yeah. So from here we move into the cavern and come upon a group of people who are dressed in plain peasant clothing. There is again going along with the kind of dark age feeling. There is a since when we come to these people that they are living abject lives of kind of darkness and ignorance and want. But the first thing we get to with these people is a scene of childbirth there. So there are all these
people in peasant clothing assisting a woman in childbirth. The baby is born, and a man in a sort of monastic beard holds the child up to this audience of elders some kind of counsel and they're asking is this the one? And a debate starts. The elder say it's too early to tell, and then another says, no, we cannot wait, we must chance it. And so they check
the infant's hand. They have this monk like man look at the hand, and the baby's palm opens and yes, we see some crinkles there, but I think they're actually doing a palm reading. The monk like man says, yes, the line is strong. I think talking about the lifeline.
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 same time, given the sort of again you said, like the dark age vibe we have here, this kind of
archaic vibe. I'm also reminded of things we've discussed on stuff to blow your mind in the past about various historian historians an anthrop anthropologists reflecting on what life was like for our ancestors before people were able to specialize more, 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.
Yeah, that is interesting, and and that kind of desperation about the time. The sense of I want more life is a fantastic premise to start with, for one thing, because it's not a you know, it's it's a very relatable feeling but accelerated for the purpose of the narrative. And it's also something it's like an unpersonified villain. It's not it's not a beast you can fight, though there
will be some beasts to fight in the story. It's just like we we we can't accept the way time flows around us, or the way our bodies flow through time. It's it's it's a terror to us.
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, you know. So that's yeah again. The film itself has a great mythic vibe. It feels like an initiation into some great secret.
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, 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 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.
Oh.
And then there's a strange moment where the man says, listen to our heart's race, and one of the elders holds the baby against her chest, and then they say, listen to your own heart race. And this, like accelerated heart rate, is a thing that comes back in the story, but it does just remind me of like, you know, putting my ear to the hearts of pets and hearing their faster little heartbeats. You know, there's small bodies and little metabolisms.
Yeah yeah, and it also will have another example of this as well. But it kind of ties into this idea that there is there is a cross generational, a cross generation connection between the individuals of the in this culture of these people that is maybe a bit surreal as well. That's maybe leaning a little bit into the fantastic, and it's not entirely based on real world human teaching and conveying of information.
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 the baby away, and the old man sort of calls after the baby's now the teaching begins. Learn quickly, little one, uh and ooh. The some kind of learning with blocks
is going on. There's a lot of cool stuff in this teaching montage. I like that we start with these little stone coins and there are squares and pyramids. It looks like stuff that would be fun to handle in the same way that D and D dice are.
Yeah, yeah, it's all very cactile. And yeah, I just love this montage because everything is very identifiable as teaching and principle on one level, but also feels very alien and also perhaps concerning a natural philosophy unknown to our world.
Yeah.
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 trans from teachers to student, yes, with physical manipulation of objects and some external learning devices, but also perhaps in a way that depends on something greater than human learning, and it maybe there is some sort of psychic connection.
And in fact, later on, when we when our hero has commenced on his journey and he hears the voices of his teachers, I mean, perhaps that is like a psychic echo of what has occurred previously.
Yeah, yeah, I like that too. It invites questions of like, is there actual telepathy going on or the or the teachers currently communicating with him as he as he goes beyond, or is it like now now part of them is in him and he just carries it with them.
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.
So already we see the child as a toddler, sorting these little shapes and blocks as the teachers look on. I love the way the blocks look. They're made of a kind of polished stone with a freckled and scarred appearance, and the child is learning to line them up in a special order, as if he were spelling words with the blocks. But what does it mean.
I 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 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 in blocks of wood.
I liked that it was strange, and then making spears out of a kind of silvery So the spears are modular and they snap together like tent poles, and then they have these fins and barbs that snap out from the poles and he's throwing the spears doing target practice with them. There's another part where he unveils a shimmering steel cone from a covering which is a metal box, and the cone emits blinding light, and then he lifts
up the cone and that unveils another level. It is like a blue glowing ball of energy that's inside the cone, and the ball of energy just floats in the air. Again, we're not told what that is. But anyway, when the training is complete, the boy now looks about ten or twelve years old, and an old man tells him it's time for you to go.
Yeah. It's like you know in elementary school when you make it halfway through learning about the Civil War and then they're like, I'm sorry, now I have to send you home for summer.
That's it.
That's all we had time for.
Yeah, I do remember that about a lot of lesson plans when I was younger, A fantastic lack of clothes about me. Things we learned. Okay, So the old man comes to the boy to tell him more about his mission. They're looking at a light pouring out from between some rocks, and the man says, that light squeezes through the crack where the doors in the Great Gate join. That gate must be opened. You will open it.
Yeah, and again this possibly lines up with this idea of I believe it is that the Joe rai or jewelry purifying light that factors into the teachings of Okichi Okata often described as kind of like an energy healing doctrine hm. Okay, And I've also read that it sometimes involves like the use of some sort of reflective medallion, which we also see a version of in this picture.
Oh interesting, Okay, I was wondering about that. Okay, So maybe they did get a few little like specific things in there.
Yeah.
Anyway, the old man says, beyond the gate is a land where life is lived for twenty thousand days and more. If the gate can be reached and opened, the light will rush out us and with it bring long life and peace. The boy asks why he has been chosen, and the old man explains, those who were sent before are left when they were too old, they left too late,
and they died before they reached the gate. This time, they selected the boy to be sent when he was very young, so he would have enough time to complete his mission. And then the old man says, you've learned. You've learned your lessons quickly. You're strong and intelligent, you have curiosity. And the boy says, but have I learned enough? And the old man does not answer the question. He just says, we don't have time to teach you anymore. You'll have to learn the rest on your way.
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.
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.
Here's your silvery space. Go out and do your best.
So the boy is outfitted with again those gleaming spears and other supplies. We see them like kind of pouring out these measures of grain and stuff for him. And before he's sent out by the elders, the old man gives him this small, like mirror polished metal pendant to hang around his neck, which may be connecting to that actual religious item used by the whatever, I forget what
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 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 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 boy wanders in darkness through dis maze of stones, hearing the weird voices, and then suddenly hearing a kind of hooting in the distance, and he draws his spear in preparation.
What is it?
What's making this sound? And there's a stillness, feathers fall on the rocks around him, and then a monster attacks.
Yeah, and it's a pretty cool monster.
I have to say, that's right. So the monster, whatever it is, first thrashes around in the darkness, roaring the boy. The boy holds out his spear, and then they eventually clash and we see some elements of the monster. It appears to be a kind of giant reptilian pit bull head with a triangular or circular triangular mouth with teeth jutting in from all sides. I gotta say that the head is a little bit rancori ish.
Yeah, yeah, there's definitely kind of a rain corps vibe. I also feel like it's maybe a combination of some sort of a giant sloth and a tartar grade, which would of course be a giant, a very giant tartar grade.
It's actually also, in fact, to draw on two different return of the Jedi. It's a little bit Rancor and a little bit Sarlac because of the circular mouth with the teeth coming in in all directions. Anyway, the boy fights the monster in the dark with his spear, and eventually he slays it, and as the beast lies dying on the ground, he approaches it and there's a kind of sadness in its eyes. And then the next thing.
This was one of the few parts where I feel like I wasn't sure I was understanding what the film was trying to suggest. There's like, after he's already slayed the monster, there's a screeching in the night, and some other creature seems to be circling the boy and he raises a rock above his head and he shouts no, and then the threat seems to fade away.
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, now he has to contend with like the darkness of what he has just done, and he's driving that away. Horrack in his book contends that we might think of this, maybe, you know, as again another example of mythic battle in
the darkness, which we see in various sagas. But he asked some questions like is this monster real? Is this a projection of the heroes mind? Again, it's the sort of film where various interpretations are possible, the no right or wrong answers.
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, I don't know if you have thoughts about the style
of this temple. Rob there's sort of a so first of all, there's a a big haul that we just see as like a rock facade, but then out in front of it there is a rock carving of a domed head with an open mouth and these wild eyes, kind of empty wild eyes, and giant hands held in an open poem position.
Yeah, the general vibe of these ruins reminding me a little bit of photos I've seen of the ancient heads of the gods in Nimrout Dog Turkey. Imagine many of you out there have seen these images before, with kind of conical looking hats on the heads.
Oh, 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.
Absolutely, yeah, so I guess it. Yet, it fittingly feels akin to various examples of real world the design traditions, but it feels also removed in its own thing. When I was looking around on letterboxed, I found a pretty great little review. Someone by the name of Roland one oh six said quote man walks through a series of prog album covers in order to save his people from their eight day life spans, which I legitimately laughed at
that and it's kind of spot on. There are many many scenes in this picture that could easily be a prog rock album cover.
Yes, yes, including the very next thing I was going to talk about, which is that as the boy is coming or I guess he's a young man now, as the hero is coming down to cross the plain of sand to get to the temple, there's another thing he sees. At first, I was confused how this interacted with the other thing. But there's like a giant teardrop shaped rock descending slowly from the sky, and there appears to be a sort of castle or something on top of it.
Yeah, this is actually mentioned in the book. This is apparently an homage to one of Saalbass's favorite visual works, The Castle of the Pyrenees by Belgian surrealist Renee Margrite. This is a work from nineteen fifty nine, and apparently Saul loved this image and had just been looking for an opportunity to somehow utilize it in his work. There's a Wikipedia article about this particular painting, and I included a sample of it here in our notes for you, Joe.
Yeah, it looks exactly the same, so clearly, yeah.
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.
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.
But yeah, I mean I think there's some shared DNA between some of the design work here and the design work of Zardas as well.
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 he makes his way all the way across the sand flat this way, which I thought was I don't know, the strange, unexpected, and obviously I don't think you can really do that. You can't move through sand that you're that deepened, and it would just there'd be too much resistance.
But it's like water, and he just passes through it.
This sequence, in particular reminds me of some of the sand related imagery that we get in Phase four.
Oh yeah, I agree. It also reminds me of a weird sort of sand progressing through a sand chamber scene in the Tarkowsky movie Stalker. But eventually the hero comes out the other side to stand on the stairs of the temple. I didn't mention this earlier, but next to the human head there's kind of a big eagle head 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 and that shakes the air.
I think so. But again, as to exactly what all this means, I mean, we're left to ponder that, like all of this, I'm assuming all of this is somehow tied to the history of these people, that these used to be their cities, that these are their temples, they or their tombs. We're not sure. But as to what 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.
But the voices in the hero's head they tell him to go on, so he does. He goes into the temple and then we see from inside the giant head with light pouring in through the eyes, which is very cool. And then inside the temple there is a swarm of star like particles suspended inside a blue light, much like the blue light that the boy uncovered in his schooling.
But before he can make sense of it, the temple continues to crumble and it just rocks and blocks are falling, and he's driven away, driven on into a different place, a tube like corridor sort of the inside of the spaceworm, where the Falcon lands and Empire strikes back. Yea, but with a raised metal boardwalk. He's saying, I'm going through 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, and I forget the name of the temple I have in mind, but there is an Egyptian temple I'm thinking of that looks like this, and he's passing through the courtyard and it somehow seems to lead into a different universe, like when he comes to the other end there is a another flat sandy plain, but this one is bathed
in blue light with pyramids that look like the Giza Complex in the distance, and then beyond that giant planets looming in the sky.
Huge. Yeah.
Yeah, So at this point I'm definitely questioning the whole Make sure you set it on Earth ray, yeah, yeah, directive here, because we really feel like we're in another world at this point. We are, at least if we're not on another planet the whole time, then we are somewhere else at this point.
Yes, you know, I don't mean to diminish it by by this comparison, but it's hard not to feel some Star Wars influence on this. For one thing, he like, he comes up to a hooded man resting against one of the columns. He's almost in a kind of either obi wan kenobi or jahwa outfit. The hooded figure in the desert and he comes up to the sky. No face is visible, but the hero is looking out on this blue landscape with the pyramid and the planets like passing into and out of alignment in the sky. The
planets are moving super fast. And then the hooded man starts to talk. He says, so they sent another one. Let's have a look at you. Yes, you're young, much younger than I was when I got here. And the 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.
All right, some fortune cookie sort of advice there, but it feels specific to this challenge as well.
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 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 more likely that would result in him failing his mission as well.
Yeah, like if he said, no, Grandpa, I needed I want to do my own research on this, like, you know, then you're going to die in the desert like this guy.
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 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 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 dynamic because time is so constricted and so he just literally does not have time to wonder whether this guy is giving him good advice or not.
He just has to follow it. Yeah, And then also the guy says, not everything that frightens or hurts you as bad. Fear and pain are your teachers learn survive. So the young man hurries on through the desert. And meanwhile, also he's another thing he asked to trust, is he's been being given these voices in his head. They're giving him advice. They're saying, you are not alone, we travel with you. So there's a scene where the hero gets
to the stairs, he has to climb. He has to climb to the top of the pyramid, and the stairs seem endless, but he goes on up and up and up, and then finally he gets to the top, where he finds a table emitting a blue light. Looks almost like a game board. I was thinking that at first, and then what do you know, It does seem like it's a game board. It's covered in the shapes that the
boy learned to manipulate in school. And then suddenly there is a roar, and we're like, oh, another monster sort of, There is a sasquatchlike creature, like a big, furry humanoid creature that approaches him, but it's not another fight to the death with a spear. This time we're facing the chess. YETI our hero has to play a board game, a game of strategy with Bigfoot, and I think may have been my favorite creative choice in the film.
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 there are so many different ways to tease it apart. Horrick and his book brings up the possibility that this is sort of like the ID, that his own ID
that he is combating here. That least, they're like his, this is his primal side. And I did when I was originally watching it, I did kind of notice some similarities between the face of the beast and the face 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.
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?
Oh?
Well, I mean you don't want to wrestle it? Look how strong this is get out smarted?
I guess so so the game itself is kind of tronish that it's like these metal shapes, these polyhedron game pieces that are zoom zooming around and zapping each other with lasers. And then, of course, eventually the YETI loses and he doesn't like that. You know, yetti's are known to rip people's arms off and they lose. So he howls in anger, and he drools and rages very bad sport,
and he seems ready to kill our hero. But suddenly it's a little unclear exactly the orientation of what's happening here, but like a walkway extends out through space toward the pyramid, leading to another structure, and then the hero leaps out onto the walkway and goes away to this other place.
The challenge has been overcome.
Yes, so this other place is a lattice of mcsher beams that are interlocking in impossible ways.
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.
Yeah, in one of the rooms, the hero goes into here seems to be inside the game he just played, like he's in shrunken form, and the game pieces are the giant shapes moving around him. He walks on the board, and of course Scale is being played with one again, like I mentioned at the beginning. But then at one point, the man, oh, and we're told I can't remember if ilread he said this, but if not, this is day five, so this is supposed to this is the time they
said earlier that he would be in midlife. And at one point the man is he's sort of messing around on the game board with these pieces, and then he looks at his reflection in a metal piece and he says to himself, he realizes he is getting old, and he has to hurry. He has to get to the gate. And I was like, wait a minute, is this literally a midlife crisis vignette?
He's like, well 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.
Yeah, he doesn't know that he should also buy a leather jacket and look into motorcycles or something.
Right, So we see him traveling through other weird landscapes, some natural, some artificial. One is like, I don't even know what you call it, like a big flat, empty rectangular space that looks out onto looks out like into the void, and there are planets beyond, so it's almost 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.
Yeah, this must be where like maybe they cut the pyramids from earlier out of this landscape. I don't know. Yeah, a landscape of just colossal works. I guess this is what we're to take from it.
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 bar is descending toward him slowly, and when it reaches him, the mechanism has controls that have hand prints on them
that he could put his hands in. It's kind of like that button that makes air on Mars and total recall, you know, a metal thing with a handprint on it. So he's like, okay, I got to put my hands 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 the caverns where the people from the First Day live, and there are lots of old people there, but we get to hear their heartbeats slowing down as the light pours over them. And the light is of a very different color warmth than the stuff we've seen before. Most of the movie has been kind of blue green gray. The light now is orange. And then we return to the hero and we find him in a land, in
a natural landscape, unlike anything we've seen before. Now the world is green, green, green. He's on these hills covered in green grass, not the kind of pale, gross blue green of the fog in the world before. Now it's like vibrant green, springtime green, the hills covered in green grass and trees with flowers blooming everywhere, and the man is just walking through it looking like Jesus.
Yeah, kind of a like a seventies white Jesus, kind of like a Kinney Loggin's kind of a look here, yeah.
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 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.
I mean, it's so upbeat and positive, and I think if you dig into it, it does get into some serious depth, you know, I mean, how do you how do you overcome the shortness of our lives and the marching of time? Well, one way is by retreating into the now and focusing on the now, focusing on any day, any hour, any minute, you know, finding those little things, you know. So that's that's what came to my mind when I heard this. But on the other level, yes,
it is like such an upbeat ending. I don't know. We get more used to more past mystic endings in our films, so I don't know, it was it was refreshing that it does feel so optimistic at the end, 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.
Well, in another one of those observations that is both profound and true and also can be kind of corny, but that doesn't make it any less true. Is the thing about you know, you can you can overcome the kind of despair about the perspective of the shortness of your life by having purpose, by having by having a mission, by having a purpose that a purpose that is sort of other oriented. You know that is driven towards not just yourself and your own gratification, but living for others.
Well, you know, it reminds me of against some of what we've been discussing in our Mystery cult series. So a lot of times some of the best nuggets of wisdom are also kind of overstatements the obvious, like, you know, love is all you need, love is the fifth element, what have you? You know, But these are also things that are true, and it all comes down to presentation.
And in the same way we talked about some of the initiations of the mystery cults, where there might be something that is key to the initiation, something that is revealed in a box, and if you just take it out of context, if you're a critic and you're just like, look at this thing they have in the box here, how corny is that? You know? But if it's within context, if it occurs at the end of the initiation, then perhaps it is able to settle into your psyche in a more rewarding way.
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 is what we live by. You know, if you just like put it in those words, somebody could be like, oh yeah, okay,
that's not all that impressive. But if you watch the whole drama and you take part in the suffering and the passion and the relief of the re union of mother and daughter and all that, it can be overwhelming. It's something that follows you every day of your life. You never never look at some flower the same way.
Again.
Yeah again, not everything that frightens or hurts you as bad fear and pain or your teachers learn survive.
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.
Yes, all right, that is nineteen eighty four's quest. Again, if you wish to experience it as well, you should be able to find it out there, and again, hopefully in the future there'll be some sort of proper restored release as well. Just a reminder for everyone out there that stuff to Blow your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema.
If you're on letterbox dot com you can find us. Our username is weird House and we have a nice list there of all the episodes that we have covered so far, all the movies we have covered so far. Rather, and I will remind you that at this point we're at one ninety six, so we're coming in hot on selection two hundred. We already have some recommendations for what that episode might be, what film we could possibly cover for the two hundredth Weird House Cinema selection, but continue
to ride in. We have not made a decision as yet.
It's going to be Mortal Kombat Annihilation.
It could be it could be that that is the most fitting choice.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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