It’s Valentine’s Day in the state of Victoria, Australia in the year 1900. A group from a local girls’ school goes on an excursion to the foot of an eerie, vast geological formation called Hanging Rock. Three girls and one schoolteacher climb up to explore it. All but one are never seen again. This summary constitutes the essential plot but only the first act of Peter Weir’s 1975 film, based on the novel by Joan Lindsay. The remaining two acts concern the surviving characters’ struggle to make s...
Jul 08, 2025•46 min
Wes & Erin discuss "The Indian to His Love."
Jun 30, 2025•38 min
Wes & Erin discuss "Leda and the Swan."
Jun 23, 2025•54 min
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Yeats’s "Sailing to Byzantium," and whether creativity can help us transcend mortality, and how artists should conceive of their relationships to nature and posterity.
Jun 16, 2025•42 min
Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” begins and ends with the concept of reproduction. In the first stanza, this reproduction is natural and sexual, and in the final stanza is entirely a matter of artifice. The living songbird is transformed into both product and producer, with a form of singing that is gilded by a consciousness of its departure from nature. Where natural reproduction replenishes entities that are neverthless always in the process of dying, art—the speaker seems to hope—is potent...
Jun 09, 2025•42 min
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Roman Polanski’s 1968 classic, and why it is that Satanic evil, when confronted with life’s very frightening realities—including pregnancy itself—turns out to be so banal.
May 26, 2025•38 min
On the surface, “Rosemary’s Baby” is a horror film about a woman who gets taken advantage of by a satanic cult and impregnated by the Devil. In the end, it seems to be a satire on the competing entrapments of domesticity and ambition, and the boring conventionality of people who hope that opposition to convention will allow them to retrieve their lost youth. Wes & Erin discuss Roman Polanski’s 1968 classic, and why it is that Satanic evil, when confronted with life’s very frightening realiti...
May 18, 2025•42 min
Erin & Wes continue their discussion of four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine.
Apr 28, 2025•35 min
Erin & Wes continue their discussion of four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine.
Apr 20, 2025•44 min
Erin & Wes continue their discussion of four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine.
Apr 07, 2025•38 min
If only because of its seeming incongruity with a brain “wider than the sky,” the central fact of Emily Dickinson’s life has become her seclusion. As she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1869, “I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town.” Like the relatively modest dimensions of her poems, this self-imposed constraint—of the property line within Amherst, Massachusetts, then the Dickinson home itself, then her bedroom—proved no barrier to a cosmic poetic imagination which “went ...
Mar 31, 2025•53 min
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1940 Best Picture winner "Rebecca," starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier.
Mar 24, 2025•38 min
Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film—part love story, part ghost story, part courtroom melodrama—centers on a poor, timid young woman who falls in love with wealthy aristocrat Maxim de Winter, a widower tortured over the death of his first wife. When the young woman becomes the second Mrs. De Winter and moves into Maxim’s estate, she finds her predecessor’s initials stamped all over the house, and its staff in thrall to her beautiful, vibrant memory. But at the heart of the first Mrs. De Winte...
Mar 17, 2025•44 min
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Rainer Maria Rilke's “You Who Never Arrived" and “Be Ahead of All Parting” (II.13 from his “Sonnets to Orpheus”), and whether—as Rilke suggests—death can be put in service of life, and suffering sourced as the principal wellspring of a joyful existence.
Feb 17, 2025•39 min
In his poem “You Who Never Arrived,” Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that we can mourn love as an unrealized possibility, and see this loss signified everywhere in the ordinary objects of the external world. In “Be Ahead of All Parting” (II.13 from his “Sonnets to Orpheus”), he seems to claim that poetry has the capacity to redeem such losses—and retrieve them, so to speak, from their underworld. Wes & Erin discuss these two classics, and whether—as Rilke suggests—death can be put in service of ...
Feb 11, 2025•46 min
Wes & Erin continue their discussion the 1970 classic “M.A.S.H,” and whether irony ought always to be our anesthetic, when confronted with traumas that are otherwise unspeakable.
Feb 03, 2025•48 min
It begins with the “stupidest song ever written,” as Robert Altman called it, and ends with a self-referential jab at the very idea of finding comic relief in the tragedy of war. But it is equally unserious, the film “M.A.S.H” seem to suggest, to take seriously the authority of war-making institutions, and their pretense to putting violence in service of an ideal. And so morality succumbs to mockery, love to hedonism, and military rank to the form of authority immanent in the power to save lives...
Jan 27, 2025•46 min
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Marianne Moore’s poem, “The Jerboa,” first published in 1932, and whether power and wealth might paradoxically prove less abundant than the strictures of form and necessity.
Jan 20, 2025•50 min
Of all the great American Modernists, the poetry of Marianne Moore is perhaps the most idiosyncratic, even the most radical, of them all—no small feat in a group of friends and admirers that included Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, and HD. Moore’s preferred form was a syllabic stanza bespoke to each poetic occasion, like the unique shell of each individual snail or paper nautilus, and often containing rhyme. In these stanzas, Moore hid behind he...
Jan 12, 2025•44 min
What can the contrast between silent and talking pictures teach us about the nature of film itself? And how might it reflect the age-old rivalries between word and image, movement and stasis, the living and the dead? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Billy Wilder’s 1950 masterpiece, "Sunset Boulevard."
Jan 06, 2025•36 min
When the film starts, its two leads are already dead, more or less. Silent Screen legend Norma Desmond’s career is dead, and because she’s nothing more than her career, the best she can do is linger in the tomb of her former glory, hoping for a resurrection. And failed screenwriter Joe Gillis quite literally enters the film as a corpse, so, as the film’s narrator, he has no choice but to tell his story in flashback. Thus, it’s safe to say that both Norma and Joe are, well, fatally disadvantaged ...
Dec 29, 2024•41 min
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin,” and whether humanity’s religious impulses can be fully compensated with an aesthetic or ironic relation to nature and cosmic scale. Thanks to our sponsor GiveWell, an organization that would provide rigorous, transparent research about the best opportunities for charitable giving. If you’ve never used GiveWell to donate, you can have your donation matched up to $100 before the end of the year, or as long as matching fu...
Dec 23, 2024•48 min
Where the repetitions of ordinary life threaten to overwhelm any sense of the sublime, the poet Conrad Aiken seems to suggest that they can be transformed into a way of being connected to it. The mundane order is, after all, just a part of the cosmic. When we get ready to go to work, it is on a “swiftly tilting planet” that “bathes in a flame of space.” The sun is “far off in a shell of silence,” but its light decorates the walls of our homes. We might wonder, in light of modernity’s crisis of f...
Dec 16, 2024•48 min
Wes and Erin continue their discussion of “Beetlejuice,” and what its battle royale between conflicting aesthetic sensibilities—rustic, gothic, and avant-garde—has to say about the connections between love, mortality, and the many pitfalls of growing up. Thanks to our sponsor GiveWell, an organization that would provide rigorous, transparent research about the best opportunities for charitable giving. If you’ve never used GiveWell to donate, you can have your donation matched up to $100 before t...
Dec 09, 2024•46 min
Adam and Barbara Maitland are dead, but their troubles have just begun. The farmhouse decor of their home is under threat from the pretentious modernism of Delia Deetze, and her plan to remake it in her own image could turn their post-life purgatory into earthbound hell. Solving this problem leaves them with an impossible choice between figuring out how to navigate an intractable netherworld bureacracy, or seeking the help of a renegade demon whose perverse remedies are worse than what they’re s...
Dec 02, 2024•43 min
Wes & Erin discuss Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee from Me.” Thanks to our sponsor, the incredible online language school Lingoda. Save up to 50 percent on your language course by going to https://try.lingoda.com/Subtext50 and using code SUBTEXT50 at checkout. When you sing up for the seven day trial, you can attend three small group classes and one private class completely free!
Nov 25, 2024•43 min
As an advisor to Henry VIII and ambassador to France and Italy, poet Thomas Wyatt was something of a professional court-surfer, practiced in riding the peaks and troughs of royal favor. Such were his verbal and diplomatic gifts that, though twice accused of and imprisoned for treason, he was twice released. His poetry reflects all the intrigue, paranoia, airlessness, and downright cruelty of the Tudor Court, where a misplaced word or an ill-timed look might see you not just out of favor, but a h...
Nov 18, 2024•52 min
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1971 film "A New Leaf," written and directed by Elaine May.
Oct 28, 2024•45 min
Henry Graham belongs to the most exclusive clubs, dines regularly at the most lavish restaurants, drives a Ferrari, employs a butler, and owns something called a Montrazini—in short, he capitalizes fully on his inheritance, despite having little understanding of what “capital” actually is. The very ignorance of practicality that his wealth affords turns out to be his undoing, as soon finds that he’s run out of money and must bid goodbye to the high life—unless, that is, he can find a single, wea...
Oct 21, 2024•45 min
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Ancient Greece’s most notorious battle of the sexes, and Euripides' rumination on the question of whether the Athenian ideals of rationality and moderation sufficiently honor the instinctual side of human nature. Thanks to our sponsor, the incredible online language school Lingoda. Go to https://try.lingoda.com/Subtext and use code SUBTEXT to save 20 EUR (or equivalent in your currency) when signing up....
Oct 14, 2024•53 min
