Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Seconds

your surprise, you should do that before listening. But secondary warning, before you go off to do that, I also have to say I was absolutely floored by the ending of

this movie. And I don't usually feel the need to issue like warnings just about a movie having disturbing content or being really unsettling, But you know, we cover a lot of weird horror and stuff but this one was, like, it shook me so hard that I feel like I should give people a bit of a heads up, especially because I think you're not really expecting it given the context. This movie is from nineteen sixty six. It's shot in

black and white. The cinematography is amazing. It looks like a film from a little bit earlier, Like it looks like it could be a really well shot, interesting looking film from the fifties. It stars Rock Hudson's that really also makes it feel like, I don't know, one of these kind of romantic comedy movies from the fifties or something. But I think, especially given all that context, I was just not prepared for the raw horror and desperate bleakness

achieved by the end of this film. So if you watch it, prepared to be shaken.

some thought it was a kind of strange masterpiece. Others thought it was cold and even reprehensible. And I didn't fully understand this division in opinion while I was watching it. Until the ending and then it made sense. But I think I would side more with the supporters. In my opinion. Seconds is a piercing, fascinating look at the nature of desire.

This is a film about what it means to want things and to want something different for your life, and it explores the really complex, troubling, hidden architecture underneath the visible edifice of all those desires. Yeah.

supported by the film. Now, one thing that I think is interesting to point out, and this is purely accidental, but I think Seconds is in many ways an interesting companion piece to The Incredible Shrinking Man from nineteen fifty seven that we recently talked about on the show. They both deal with themes of mid century midlife crisis and fantastic treatments of desired or undesired change. In The Incredible shrinking man. Our protagonist is literally diminished and ultimately reaches

a point of acceptance and ultimately even transcendence. Seconds, however, deals with the siren song of escape and liberation from one's own life, and is ultimately a far darker tale.

Criterion Collection. So yeah, it's a film that, despite it's seeming mixed reviews when it came out, or mixed reception critically and so forth, it has developed a cult following over the decades, and I think is largely very well received and admired today.

a drama starring Kim Hunter. In the sixties, though, he really came into his own first with The Young Savage, a nineteen sixty one street gang flick starring Burt Lancaster as a district attorney, not as a troubled youth, I should say, because I don't know Burt Lancaster ever was a youth. He also did a trio of films in nineteen sixty two, All Fall Down with Warren Beatty, Birdman of Alcatraz with Lancaster and Carl Malden, and The Manchurian

Candidate starring Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansberry. That is probably one of his more famous films.

and conspiracy spectrum. And then comes the movie Seconds. Frankenheimer continued work steadily throughout the rest of his life, and some of the standouts include seventy five's The French Connection two, nineteen seventy seven's Black Sunday. This was the first film adaptation of a Thomas Harris novel. The nineteen seventy nine mutant Bear movie Prophecy, which we've mentioned a few times on the show before.

Raal Julia. He of course stepped in to replace Richard Stanley on nineteen ninety six as the Island of Doctor Moreau, and then he also directed nineteen ninety eight's Ronan, which is a pretty entertaining espionage thriller. As I recall, it's got a really solid cast and some excellent vehicular stunts.

screenplay credit, but certainly not the last. His later screenplays include nineteen seventy twos of the Mechanic and nineteen seventy nine's The Great Santini starring Robert Devall. This was based on the Pat Conroy novel, and Carlino also directed film Now this film, Seconds is based on the novel by David Ealy born nineteen twenty seven. The only other adaptation of his work that I ran across as a nineteen seventy one segment on Night Gallery titled The Academy starring

Pat Boone. I think I've seen this one because I think it's season one, but I don't remember it at all. Seconds was a nineteen sixty three novel, and his other works include sixty eight Timeout and nineteen ninety two is a journal of the flood year. All right, getting into the cast here, and yes, there're gonna be some spoilers, as we discussed, like who each of these people is playing.

We have this character named Arthur Hamilton. He's the initial incarnation of our protagonist, a successful man who's deeply uncomfortable in his own life and completely bottled up emotionally. It is, in my opinion, just a really great performance by the actor. John Randolph, who lived nineteen fifteen through two thousand and four.

As such, Randolph was forced to work outside of Hollywood and New York film televis in radio for a good fifteen years.

But his TV and film credits are pretty lackluster up until the mid sixties, and this film Seconds was his first real film role coming out of that Blacklist period. Now, after Seconds, he did a lot more TV work, including Night Gallery, and played the chairman in two Planet of the Apes movies, Escape in Conquest at seventy one and seventy two. He was in Serpico in seventy three, the al Pacino cop movie. He was in the seventy six King Car film Heaven Can Wait in seventy eight, Pritzy's

Honor in eighty five. Oh, I didn't recognize him at all from this, but he was in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation in eighty nine playing Clark Griswold.

not sure. I can't really imagine him being Frank Costanza long term on the show. Likewise, I can't imagine Jerry Stiller playing this role in this movie.

and unfulfilling. He's just sitting there, like containing all of his disappointment within himself and not really getting to express it. And this character does have an arc where he goes other places, but as we're about to reveal in a minute, this actor doesn't get to be there for that.

can see the gears turning. So excellent performance. Yeah, absolutely, And you know, I don't think i'd really seen much of his work before outside of obviously Christmas Vacation, which you know, it is perfectly fine. I've seen it a million times, but not really a showcase for his work, all right. Playing author Hamilton's wife, Emily Hamilton is Francis Reid, who lived nineteen fourteen through twenty ten. American actor, best known in film for her role here, but she also

acted in nineteen seventy one's The Andromeda Strain soap opera. Fans, however, might recognize her from This Is Correct, three three hundred and ninety three episodes of Days of Our Lives, in which she played Alice Horton from nineteen sixty five through two thousand and seven.

and through fraudulent documents and so forth. There's a whole organization we'll get to that, but basically, one character becomes this other take on the Carre and a new actor takes over the role. That actor is Rock Hudson, who lived nineteen twenty five through nineteen eighty five.

do that. It's such an inversion of what we have today, where the biggest actors around are you know, almost inevitably, with some notable exceptions of it, there no, any of these generalities are not going to be one hundred percent, but you know, it's not surprising to see someone who's won multiple Oscars show up in a Marvel movie or in you know, whatever the or Star Wars or what

have you. But back in the day, you know, as we've discussed on these various genre pictures, they were lower down on the pecking order, and so yeah, it's not surprising to find a situation where rockets and had never been in a movie that had robots or aliens or even you know, the sort of ultimately kind of light, sophisticated sci fi, you know, kind of more Twilight Zone

ish elements that you find in this picture. Like you said, he was, I mean he was a nineteen fifties leading man perhaps, I mean not just a he was kind of the nineteen fifties leading man. He's the top build actor in this film. And he was easily one of the biggest, if not biggest movie stars off his era. His main film roles were stuff like his biggest pictures anyway, from the fifties were stuff like All That Heaven Allows

Written on the Wind and Pillar Talk. These are all movies where you look at you can pull him up now on the database of your choice, and all the posters prominently feature his character romantically embracing the lead actress. That is not the case with Seconds. No, so so yeah, going into that, this was a departure. And I'm to understand he was not Frankenheimer's first choice for the role. Apparently Frankenheimer considered Rock Hudson to you know, to be

maybe a lighter weight actor. Ultimately, you know, he's the he's the rom com guy, he's the heart throb guy. He's like, I need somebody like a Bert Lancaster. But ultimately he gets sold on Rock Hudson, like his agent says, you know, no, Hudson can do this. He's excited for this role. And and in thees, so Frankenheimer was proved wrong and has admitted as such. And and I know, I absolutely agree. I think Hudson's performance in this is great.

I think he perfectly captures this sense of the reborn in Seconds.

performance is so strong. I was like, even not being that familiar with Rock Hudson's work, I was like, I don't know if Hudson's going to really be able to pull this off, or we're going to feel it's going to feel unequal. But I really think that he pulls off a great performance here, and yeah, I can't imagine it being any different now. Hudson would go on to appear in two more films you could qualify as science fiction nineteen seventy six is Embryo in nineteen eighties, The

Martian Chronicles, and the various other films. I think he's in an avalanche movie that was covered on Mystery Science Theater at some point late in his career. Much has been written about Hudson's personal life, as he was a gay man working at a time and in a position that did not permit him to live openly as such, and this is also factored into a fair amount of

film analysis. You know, retrospectively concerning seconds. But any way you shake it, any way you look at it, this is now largely considered to be one of his best performances. I think I read that it's a performance that Hudson himself was very proud of, and I think with good reason.

people probably saw it through MST. She played the title role in nineteen sixty one's Angel Baby, which starred George Hamilton and was the film debut of Bert Reynolds pre Mustache. Of course, she was in sixty five's The Fool Killer opposite Anthony Perkins, and then comes Seconds in which she plays this captivating character Nora that our protagonist encounters in his new life in bohemian California.

She was also in a single episode of Tales from the Cryptomaniac at Large. That one's notable because that one was directed by John Frankenheimer. That was a pretty solid episode. That was one that we actually discussed on a past anthology of Horror for stuff to blow your mind. Oh okay, that one had adam Ant in it. You might recall she also pops up on Star Trek the Next Generation, and also had a more substantial role as the female shape Shifter on fifteen episodes of Star Trek Deep Space nine.

She narrated nineteen eighty six's Clan of the Cave Bear and did other voice work late in her career. All right, So at the heart of this movie, there's a sinister corporation that is called The Company, and it has various individuals working in it. I'm going to go lighter on the backgrounds on these actors, just because I don't want to spend the entire podcast just talking about the Stellar cast.

But heading this up, or seemingly heading this up, is the Old Man, played by Will Gear, who lived nineteen oh two through nineteen seventy eight, botanist turned actor and lifelong activists who also found himself blacklisted in nineteen fifties Hollywood after refusing to name names before Congress. Other films of note include nineteen sixty sevens In Cold Blood and nineteen seventy two's Jeremiah Johnson.

the Planet of the Apes. Also the film Little Big Man from nineteen seventy. We also have a character named Doctor Inni. This is the I guess, the plastic surgeon that works for the company, and he is played by Richard Anderson, who lived nineteen twenty six through twenty seventeen. American actor, best known on screen for supporting roles in fifty eight Paths of Glory, fifty nine's Compulsion, and fifty

six's Forbidden Planet. On TV, he played Oscar Goldman, who is the boss of both the six Million Dollar Man and the six million Dollar Woman, or I guess like

the twelve million dollar man in Woman. There's also another interesting character in the company, a character named Devallo, and he's played by the actor Kay d who lived nineteen ten through nineteen ninety one, an American actor of Anglo Egyptian Sudanese ancestry who tended to play characters of Asian descent in various pictures and TV projects from nineteen fifty

through about nineteen ninety. His other big film was nineteen sixty two's The Manchurian Candidate, where he played the brainwashing expert doctor Yen Lowe.

in nineteen seventy six's Network. All Right, moving outside of the company here we have another character or not completely outside of the company, but another character encounter is a character named Charlie, and he's played by Murray Hamilton, who lived nineteen twenty three through nineteen eighty six stage and screen actor who might not be as recognizable to many in this film. But Joe, where do you know this guy from?

with all the anchors on it is out? When people realize, hey, as I, you know, settle into the late middle age, I want to I want to start wearing jackets, like like the mayor from Jaws does.

real master of shadow. Was highly sought after for multiple decades, ultimately earned ten Oscar nominations, including for this film, and one two of them they're only like when I I was looking into him, I was like, well, hopefully this guy did some weird films, something that we could discuss for weird House. And out of all the movies he did, I think only two or three classify it, but this was one of them, and I'm glad we went with this one.

interest in photography and a old time mintly cinematography. Now, as he grew older, he tried his hand at a few different career paths, but eventually worked his way into first commercial photography and then cinematography in la during the

Silent film era. He did assistant camera and clapper work as early as nineteen nineteen, but served as cinematographer for the first time on nineteen twenty three's Drums of Fate, due apparently in part to star Mary Miles Minter, who took note of Howell's technical ability capturing I believe the darkness in her eyes. He had some trick for photographing her just the right way, and she's like, well, this is the guy, this is who I want to work with,

and work he did. He worked steadily throughout the twenties, thirties, and forties, and became highly sought after, working with such directors as Howard Hawks again Todd Browning. He worked on such films as nineteen thirty four as The Thin Man. He was also the uncredited cinematographer on those orchestra segments

in Disney's Fantasia in nineteen forty woh Okay. He made numerous technological innovations as well, and ultimately cemented his place as an innovator and master, particularly of shadow as well as deep focused cinematography now in many respects, Yeah, his is a great Chinese American success story, but it's also essential to realize a lot of what he was up against. He couldn't obtain US citizenship till the nineteen forties due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, which ran from eighteen eighty

two through nineteen forty three. And he also could neither legally marry or publicly acknowledge his wife, Sonora Babb until the nineteen fifties due to California laws against interracial marriage and the moral clause of his studio contract, which I think that the basic idea is there, like he couldn't legally marry her, and then due to the moral clause of his contract, he could not like publicly be in

a relationship with her, that sort of thing. Then, during the years of the Hollywood Blacklist, his wife was blacklisted for alleged Communist sympathies, and Howl himself was gray listed. This forced them to move to Mexico for a period, though year by year his output seemed to remain pretty steady by the look of things, so you know, one way or another, he was still finding projects to work on.

Other films of note that he worked on include nineteen fifty six's The Rose Tattoo, This was his first oscar win, nineteen fifty eight's The Old Man in the Sea, nineteen sixty three's Hud that's also one that won him an Oscar, nineteen sixty eights, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, nineteen seventies The Molly Maguires, and nineteen seventy five's Funny Lady. This was his last film for which he was also

nominated for an Oscar. He also has eight directorial credits to his name, including nineteen fifty four's Go Man, Go in nineteen fifty eight's Invisible Danger. But again, his work in this film is just tremendous. I think you've never seen a film that he worked on like this is a perfect starting place.

music like that. And then you also have dark, moody strings and minor chords on the organ. Again, this is a score by Jerry Goldsmith kind of reminds me in a way of some of Howard Shore's music for like David Cronenberg movies. Yeah, that would come later, of course. And throughout the credit sequence we have extreme close ups on human facial features with a kind of fun house

mirror effect. Everything is warped and inverting upon itself, lips, teeth, ears, eyes, and then there's one part that's kind of funny with the name Rock Hudson appearing across the sclare of a tortured eyeball, and then finally a face covered in cloth wrapping, almost like a ski mask, but I think it is supposed to be bandages.

I think it's actually Grand Central station. It is, And there is a type of shot that I believe occurs several times in the film where the camera is kind of floating over the man's shoulder from behind and following him very tightly as he moves. It's almost like it's glued to him. And this has, for some reason a very unsettling paranoid effect. It's like the feeling of an unseen spirit chasing and observing your every move.

So the man who's walking ahead turns out to be our protagonist, Arthur Hamilton, and the stranger who's following him follows him through the crowd, down the stairs, all the way onto a train and then suddenly calls out his name and hands him an address written on a piece of paper and then departs, leaving Arthur just standing there on the train baffled. What is this?

we tend to have nowadays. You know, a lot is said and commented upon regarding like differences in aging, or aimingly difference that there are differences in aging, et cetera.

rather unhappy with his life. And this doesn't come from overt expressions of emotion, but rather from kind of what is unsaid and his something kind of straining underneath the surface. We see him at his job, where he obviously makes a very good living. It seems he could hardly complain about that, and yet he is just clearly bored with his work and preoccupied. We see means of Arthur and his wife Emily interacting, and there's an interesting approach here.

I feel like a lesser film might have made their relationship more strife ridden or more strained. But they don't fight, they're not overtly unhappy. They are basically loving and supportive of one another. But there's something kind of intangible missing. You get the sense that their marriage is basically celibate, and that they're like in that he reads this in a way that's just kind of gray and disappointing.

would have any way of knowing. It has to be Charlie. But how could he be back from the dead. Well, Charlie tells Arthur to go to the address the man on the train gave him. He sort of like gives him this this exhortation. I think he I don't recall exactly. I think he also sort of implies like, you've got to do it for me.

oh my god, what's gonna what's gonna happen? Author you should really really be walking in I don't want to say confidently, because he doesn't really do anything with confidence, but it's there's it's a very sinister ara to everything.

and they have a proposition for him. They say, Arthur, what if you could have another chance at life? In fact, we know that you are unhappy with your life, you are not satisfied. What if you could start over somewhere else and have the life that you really wanted, that you know you should have had to begin with. This company claims they can give that to you. Now, they charge a very hefty fee they're going to take. I think they say it's thirty thousand dollars, which is a

lot in the money of the time. But they can do this impossible thing. They will stage your death, freeing you from your family and work obligations, and they will give you advanced plastic surgery basically full body plastic surgery to completely transform your identity and appearance. So they can take this bored middle aged man and his boring gray life and transform him into the man he wishes he could be. Now there's an interesting ripple here because at

first Arthur seems very hesitant. But they say, well, we know everybody actually wants this, but they're going to feel unable to say yes. So to help you along with your decision, we have removed that choice for you with the help of blackmail. So they say, when you first arrived, we drugged you and we took photos staging a fake sexual assault with you as the perpetrator, and if you try to leave, we'll release the photos. So you have

no choice. You have to say yes. But this is presented as we're doing you a favor because we know you want to agree to this. You just don't feel like you can. Now you don't have a choice.

He's a man called Antiochus Wilson. Now, of course, since the company faked his death and committed all this fraud, he has to keep his past life absolutely secret, so he can't go around saying, you know, I used to be this other guy. He has to just pretend all he is is antioch As Wilson, that other life never existed. During this process, he undergoes therap sessions to sort of

I think it's to uncover his true desires. And there's a theme that emerges during these therapy sessions that'll come up a couple of times in the film, where I think they put him under hypnosis and record the things he's talking about, and before he gets into talking about the things that they try to actualize, there are moments where he kind of regresses into childhood desires and he

keeps talking about a big red ball. So there's this establishment of a theme that becoming free to actually seek one's true desires is in a way a kind of regression into more and more immature objects of desire. But they find through all this process that Arthur actually always had an interest in painting. We find out later that he sort of had a watercolor hobby. You know, he would do little paintings, but he never got to really pursue this because, of course, you know, he's trying to

have a serious career as a banker. So they set him up as a professional painter with a house on the West coast, and they send him off to settle into his new life where he has like a butler or a valet. I think the guy's name is John, Is that right?

free spirit who also left her previous life behind. Of course, he can't admit that he did this. And they meet and get to know one another, and they bond, and eventually there's a scene where they attend like a literal bacchan al together a bunch of hippies get naked and they're like chugging and playing musical instruments and stomping on grapes and.

I thought it was really good because he's he's they're showing him the paintings that they have provided that he they're setting him up with his portfolio of his previous work and talking about, you know, and then you'll you'll change up your style a bit and you'll do something different, and and they he has some hesitation about this, you know, because it's like I really I don't have that level of ability. And they're like, it doesn't matter, because you

will be established. And I thought that was that was very chilling and kind of kind of cutting, and one of the many moments in the film that you know isn't about like, you know, high levels of anxiety or fear, but it's just very solid.

very empty with this life. There's a scene where he paints, and that the scene is just painful because, as you said earlier, like there so they establish his reputation as an artist by buying paintings done by someone else, faking them as his, passing them off as his, and now

he gets to paint. When he goes to paint, it's it's obvious he's not happy doing it, Like he may have been happy in his previous life doing his little amateur watercolors, but now that he is supposed to be a serious painter and he realizes he's not like satisfied with the paintings that he can produce with his own hand, something is very like gnawing at him about this.

They're also born yes, they're also reborns. And they're like, you're gonna spoil this for all of us if, like the company gets exposed, if we get found out too, you got to shut up. And you got to think that that also sort of cheapens it for him, right, that like all of his so called friends are also frauds.

He pretends to be a friend of her late husband's, and so he goes to visit the house and speaks to her, I think he's like, hey, you know, I maybe wanted I'm a painter and I wanted to paint a portrait of your husband because he was a friend of mine. He also asks about the watercolors. He's like, you know your husband's watercolors? Do you still have them? And it's interesting there's an unresolved thing from this conversation. I wonder what you made of this where she's like, oh,

the watercolors. Yeah, and he's like, did you get rid of them? And she says not exactly.

couldn't say it. He was just holding it in. And in the background in this scene, we know that now he's gotten all of the things that he yearned for when he was unsatisfied with his previous life, the life he had when he pursued what he had been taught to want. So there's the second order thing, the things he thinks he really wanted, his genuine one, good looks, glamour, artistic expression, excitement, sex, drugs, bacchanalia. And yet we can tell that he is not at all happy by acquiring

these things either. There is a deep hollowness and fraudulence and anxiety at the core of his new existence. So his wife sends him away with a memento of her late husband. It's his tennis trophy, which is is a callback to a scene earlier where when his friend Charlie called him on the phone and said, hey, you know this is really me. You can know because look on the underside of our tennis trophy from the doubles tournament.

We carved this into the bottom. I think it's like, you know, fidelis Eternia or something, and So when Antiochus Wilson leaves the house, he is picked up by John, the valet from the company, in a car and he says, I want to go back, and John says, of course, sir. He says, no, no, no, I don't mean to California. I want to go back to the company. I want to start again again. Is it possible, Anti kis Wilson can die, can't he? And John says, I think that

can be arranged, sir. So they go back to the company and here Rock Hudson meets with his caseworker and they explained to him, yeah, we can set you up with a new life once again. You know, sometimes this happens. People are not satisfied with their second life. They need another. But before we do that, we do need you to do something for us. We would ask you to sponsor someone else for our programs. Someone you know obviously, you know you must know tons of people who would be

good candidates. We just need you to give us a name, somebody we can get in touch with, and we might need you to stay on hand to help them, maybe make some phone calls to them to make sure that you know that they end up in our care. And this makes sense because they can't add what they do is illegal. They can't advertise on the news in the newspaper.

They have to operate on a personal referral basis. And here it becomes clear there was a payoff of a waiting room that Arthur Hamilton went into earlier in the movie. That's full of men just sitting around, playing cards, reading books, hanging out, just seemingly waiting, you know, wiling away the hours. Here we meet Murray Hamilton and it turns out this is this is Arthur Hamilton's old friend, Charlie, the guy from school, except of course he looks nothing like him.

He has had a second, second life a he is a reborn by this company. But it turned out he also needed another chance. He also needed to start over again, but he couldn't do that until he fulfilled his duty for referring Arthur Hamilton here, and they'd had him on hand so he could continue making phone calls to him and helping him get settled in.

He's like, I can't think of anybody to refer. I'm sorry, and he's really hung up on he's got to have another chance at a new life because he screwed up the first one, and you know, he just wanted what people taught him to want. The second time, he wanted something else, but he didn't do it right. Something wasn't right about it. But the third time, then he'll get it, then he'll really fulfill his desires.

have ideas. Let's work together so that this can work.

he was in the building belonging to the company. Will Gear is very good in this role because he's very folksy, and he's very soft spoken, and he's just like a sweet, sweet old man who talks about his dream of giving people what they really want. He knows that so many people live lives of kind of quiet misery that they just can't can't really commit to living the lives they know they should be living, and he wanted to create

the opportunity for people to have that chance. But then he also gets a little real He's like, you know, so that is the ideal under which I started the company. But the fact is, you know, now we have a lot of employees, and we got to make payroll, and we have shareholders, and we've got to meet our obligations to shareholders. So if we don't have an ongoing you know, basis of new referrals coming in, we really can't keep doing what we're doing. In order to make the dream work.

We gotta have money coming in, So you got to refer somebody.

ending where they strap rock huts into a gurney. He thinks he is being taken off to his next plastic surgery to get a whole new face, a whole new body, a whole new identity again, and it turns out no, they are taking him off to become one of the cadavers that will be used to fake the death of a new applicant.

fabulously shot, this strange hallway that they're going down. I can only imagine that some of the gurney scenes in Jacob's Ladder that would come many many many years later, or perhaps referring back to this sequence, because you know, at first, he's you know, he's just expressing his you know, concerns over it, and then it becomes clear that this priest perhaps that is speaking to him, is basically administering last rites.

We go into the death room with him, and there is the doctor from earlier, his plastic surgeon, and he explains, you know, like, yeah, you were my best work. I really nailed it.

it is some other scene. Maybe you could interpret it as him and a parental unit on the beach with a red ball, like you know, it's I guess it's abstract like that, but like this, I guess was the true desire. You know, this was you know, deep down in him, like this is the most honest part, the purest part of his life, and it's the last thing we see. You know.

saying imagining a different movie that could have been. I think the ending would have felt very different if there was some character in it somewhere who got it, who figured out the I don't know what the correct desire is, the desire that that one can have in order to find true happiness, And the movie does not give an answer on that. It doesn't. It just shows It shows you lots of failures of wisdom and failures to understand ourselves, and the pitfalls of desire and the hollowness of desire.

But it never shows you the right way. It never provides the solution. So so you you know, you're not given like that sort of ladder out of the pit of despair.

that cycle. But there is no such revelation in this film because ultimately he's like, give me another shot. I think the next shot is it. I think the next shot will be better, and he just commits to the wheel and that is undoing.

But it seems like the kind of thing that someone could pick up for some sort of a television series, you know, especially nowadays thinking of the success of things like Severance and so forth. There's a lot you could do with seconds. But on the other hand, as we often say with films that really nail something, I don't really want to see someone else come in and perhaps screw it up. This this film doesn't need to be reborn.

As I mentioned the other day, off off my my one caveat would be this would have made a great tree House of Horror episode if the Simpsons had done a send up of this with Homer Simpson or I don't know, there are various other Simpsons characters that might have been ideal for this treatment, but I can imagine at least the old Days of the Simpson Treehouse of Horror. They could have they could have done this up really nicely.

performance and the sinemography and so forth. Right in we'd love to hear from you. We discuss listener mail from everything we do here in the Stuff to Blowing Mind podcast feed on our Monday listener mail episodes. Our Core science episodes air on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays, we do a short form monster fact or Artifact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns even though it's a pretty serious movie and many respects for Weird

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