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Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, it is the return of d Harlan Wilson. He is while he's an author. We've talked with him a few times before, I think at least twice before, and he's back for a third time and we are talking about Strangelove Country, science fiction, filmosophy, and the Cabrician consciousness. It's a heavy title, it's a great book. Had a great time talking with
mister Wilson, and I hope you enjoyed this interview. Karland, tell me how did Strangeloft County come about?
I initially conceived of it. I was looking for a new book project to do about jeez. It's probably during COVID and I had put out a book on Minority Report the film through Liverpool University Press's Constellation series, which I think I was in limbo for a bit, but they're starting to get it going again. There was a lot of administrative overhaul there. At any rate, they came out with a new series call I Think It's just
Stanley Kubrick Studies. And I saw that and it was new, and I'm always looking for kind of new series in my field to write for, and I've long wanted to do a book on Kubrick, so that was the spark. The content of the book came about thereafter. A lot of it is about out I read Kubrick's futurist cinema through the lens of desire, simply put, and theoretically speaking, desire accounting for a little bit of avant garde film
studies and theory. And I don't know, it just kind of came together and I wrote it for this series. Usually with books of this nature, takes about anywhere from six to twelve months for research and then the same for writing. But it actually didn't work out with Liverpool University Press. I took certain creative liberties. You've read it. It's a work of scholarship formatted like a formal work of scholarship, but I do take some novelistic lines of
flight let's say it, and they didn't like that. Personally. I think archival research is wonderful, but I can't sist still, and it's just not for me. And Kubrickians, especially Kubrickan scholars, tend to be very fond of our chival research, and I think they wanted more of that from me, and mine was pretty much the opposite of that, much more structuralist, let's say so. It was a little tense there for a while, and then eventually we went our separate ways.
It's fine. I still I'm the reviews editor for the journal Extrapolation, which is published by Liverpool University Press. Everything it's cool. But I ended up publishing it with Stalking Horse Press, which is they published one of my books prior to that, called The Psychotic Doctor Schreber, a few years before. I think it was two tenty seventeen, and that was the right fit. They understood exactly what I was doing, and geez, it took about a week turnaround
once I figured out where to place it. But again, it was kind of tense at the time. I was a little angry, but then I took a step back and realized it was the right thing to do. Yeah, that's how it came about.
It's a fascinating approach to it, and I really appreciate the approach that you took that it wasn't just so cut and dry that it actually is personal while being scholarly at the same time. And that's a fine hind to walk.
It is, absolutely I really love walking that line, and I have not always done it well. I keep saying this about this book, and you're always supposed to say that the latest thing is the best. I really do think this book came together in a way that nothing I've written beforehand did, especially in the way that you've put it in terms of my sort of scholarly voice and purview, coupled with my personal connection to Koprick and
the various creative kind of things that I do on it. Basically, just to say, the creative lines of Flight basically take the form of me making Strange Love into a character that kind of haunts all of the films that I discuss. I start with Strange Love and then go to two thousand and one o'clock or Orange, and then finally Ai, which Kubrick didn't make, of course, but was involved with
for years collaborating with Spielberg. It's not as if there's dialogue, for instance, as in a novel, but it's not something you find in traditional scholarly work.
I just appreciate that it's not even in a typical format. It looks more like it's paperback book. And so when I approached it, I was approaching it as more a work of fiction. But then it's not just that it's so much more the fiction. It really fits into more of the scholarly shape. But I like the actual shape of the book is more approachable, I suppose, and much
easier to read. I have to say, the most scholarly books that I have, which I am almost in danger of letting them fall in my face as I'm reading and I'll break my nose kind of thing.
I'm really happy you said that, because that is something aspire for. And that was you know, I've long written fiction and nonfiction, dating back to when I became a professor. Before that, and the scholarly work that I'd done for years was more jargony and more like academy ease and all of that. You think years, I've really made an effort to make it more readable and expand the audience from just sort of specialists in the field.
Well, I really appreciate that approach. I think things like and I'm trying to remember the gentleman who wrote about Tarkovsky's Stalker from a much more personal point of view. I mean the works of Kayla Janice with how she approaches feminist film scholarship and really injects her own personal
take on things as well. It just fits into that, and I'm really kind of hoping that we move more towards that, or at least have that as an available option for scholarly works to also involve the personal, because it's the old personal is the political kind of thing. It's like, yes, this actually makes a big difference totally.
Yes, I'm working on a book on link Ladders of Scanner Darkly Now, another Philip case Dick related book that's much bigger on his on life writing about Philip K. Dick, the biographies and memoirs, And I'm doing I shoot straighter than I do in Strange Love Country. It's more formally scholarly, but I like to think I'm maintaining that more colloquial voice.
Yeah, and it's interesting that you just approach Kubrick from the science fiction point of view, because whenever I talk about Kubrick's like he was invested in so many different genres, but science fiction is a thread that goes through so many of his works, and I just found that to be really smart that you approach it because it's those three films. For at first, Blush could not be more
different or for films. Sorry, I forget about AI. And the AI chapter was probably surprisingly the chapter that I fell in love with the most, just because I was not aware of the Spielberg Kubrick differences and who brought what to which party, and then of course your take on everything. I was just like, oh, this is really nice, because most of the time I just read capsule reviews or very simplistic stuff. But I was like, this is finally as in depth as I'm looking for with these works.
When I saw AI, I was like, oh, okay, here's here. Like Rouge City, for instance, clearly that's Kubrick, right, whereas the family dynamics, which is Spielberg's kind of big thing, family riffs and so forth, that wasn't the case at all. It was the inverse of that. Rouge City was Spielberg, the family stuff was Kubrick. Which was really interesting to me. And there's a couple of books that go into One of them was by Julian Rice. The name escapes me,
but he talks about all of those dynamics. It was fascinating. That's another reason I love this book and loved writing it is I learned so much writing about this. So there's a lot of scholarship out there, and I've read, obviously before this book, a lot of that scholarship. But like we were talking about earlier, I'm always looking to do something not crazy new, but just a little bit
new and original. And Nah, it just worked out. And I should add two that cinema is such that it kind of fits together like a puzzle, or at least that's what I found when I was looking at those futurist films and then thinking about them in terms of his entire oof. It really does fit together like an equation. It's like geometry. I was talking to Johnsdale and he said, it's like music, you know, it's like kind of reading
music too. It all fits together. So that made it easier for me to apply my theory to it and discuss it.
Yeah, when we were talking about a clockwork orange on the show. Years ago, somebody had posited, what if what's going on on Earth is a clockwork orange, what's going on up in space is two thousand and one a space odyssey, And I thought, okay, yeah, that's possible. I don't know if the world that has your Alexis is also the world that has these satellites out there, but yeah,
I can kind of see that. And then when you take the classical music to bring your point in, as far as the music fitting together, it's like, yeah, here's the electronic version, the Windy Carlos version down here on Earth, and then here's the Recard Strauss up in space, where it's like the pure version of it.
And i'd add I use the phrase called chessboard precision and prevision, which goes hand in hand with that too. And Kubrick, if I recall, was a pretty good chess player and play often all the time. Yeah. Incidentally, I seem to be kind of drawn to these figures. We talked about my book on Gigi Ballard several years ago. His collective life work is similar. It's similarly geometric and musical and kind of mathematical the way it fits together.
So I think moving forward, I just need to keep finding these guys who make it easier for me to write about them.
Well, yeah, I don't want to jump too far ahead, but you're talking about your Minority report. I was like, well, there, you've got your Spielberg you were just talking about in Ai. You've got your Billip k Dick, who you're going to be working on more.
Now.
I'm just like, wow, Yeah, all this stuff just kind of pays to play with each other. I love it.
Yeah, I was thinking about that before we start talking tonight. All these let's see Ballard. Yeah, let's just take Ballard, Dick, and Kubrick. They're all cut from the same cloth. They deal with a lot of the same themes, but at the same time are quite different as are. I discovered their fans and scholars. Dick Ians, Ballardians, and Kubricians are all very distinctive, but all quite different and intriguing in
different ways. Yeah, and that's important to me to kind of tap into that community when writing these books and try to get a sense of the pulse helps my own carrying out of the material.
You mentioned that you learned a lot while you were writing this book, and I'm curious what were some of the things that you've learned.
So primarily I should mention two this book called Filmosophy by Daniel Brampton, very obscure book. The main thing I learned to answer your question is how the philosophy he developed in Filmosophy, which is a filmful a new I think it's subtitled Manifesto is in the subtitle, I can't remember what it is, but it's a manifesto for rethinking film. So I had read it befour years ago. I think I've even reviewed it for a journal, but then I kind of lost track of it. And Daniel Frampton is
as far as I know. Have you ever heard of him or no, Sophie, I think he was a filmmaker, maybe still is. He only wrote that one book and then disappeared. It was published by Wallflower Press in two thousand and seven. I think Wallflower Press is out of England, and I believe he is British. But it was such a cool book and mostly really strong. But there's some wacky things in that book that didn't resonate with me.
But I didn't really understand it until, like a lot of stuff, until I started writing about it, and not just writing about it, but applying it to text. In this case Kubrick, that's when I really discover things. The theory in the book essentially belongs to him. In a nutshell, what he argues is that cinema, individual films, and in Kubrick's case and many filmmakers' cases, their entire filmographies form what he calls a filmmind portmanteau of film and mind
in film studies. Looking at cinema as a brain has long been under discussion. To lose it was big on that, but it predates to lose anyway. He's kind of writing that out later on. And the short of it is that cinema functions as a kind of external brain, an entity separate from the directors, the actors, everybody who's making it, but especially the filmmaker him or herself. So this film mind, it belongs to the film, that film, or any film,
let's relegate it to Kubrick. There is a collective Kubrickian film that is kind of I don't know if I want to say sentient or even alive, but it is an operative thing, let's say. And it enabled me, first and foremost to distance ideas about Kubrick from the films themselves, because often I mentioned this in some depth in the introduction, Kubrick's been attacked for racism, misogyny, what are some of the other ones? Sexism, Yeah, sexism, all the bad things,
and rightly so in some cases. But he's also been called an an amoralist and an I guess an immoralist for lack of it. And you can defend all of those with evidence from the films. By applying this filmosophy to it, it enabled me to push that aside essentially
and focus on how I thought. In any case, the films were working as these science fiction apparatuses that spoke to the project of cinema at large, as well as Kubrick's futurist cinema and his entire as well as you know, the individual films themselves.
As you're talking, I'm thinking of myself, where are all the black people? And I can think of James Earl Jones. That's about it with these four particular films. I mean, there's no Dick Hiloran in this one. You know, there's no talk of the N word going on. But yeah, very relegated and even so much trying to think with these I mean women are just so sexualized in Clockwork. Orange are barely present in two thousand and one, and I would say pretty barely present in Strange Love as well.
It's so weird because there are such sexualized objects when it comes to Clockwork, But then AI get that weird mother thing going on. So yeah, but yeah, really so much the story of men with these films.
Absolutely, and there's several art threads that kind of run throughout this. Another one that I haven't mentioned yet is how Kubrick's futurist cinema brings together a critique of masculinity, of techno masculinity. I basically say, masculinity under the auspices of technological power, let's say, which to some degree accounts for a lack of or you could argue accounts for the lack of women who are definitely marginalized throughout in addition to people of color, Like two thousand and one,
that's a problem. There's no black people in that. I mean, give me a break, among others. That's what the future looks like. I'm not sure, but go back to Doctor Strangelove, and I mentioned this in the chapter where I cover that film. Scott George C. Buck Turgitson's secretary. I make an argument that she's maybe the strongest female character in
his entire at least in the future of cinema. Now I'm thinking of Barry Lindon and stuff like that, and then actually Nicole Kidman Eyewride Shut is actually the source of power in that. And I would argue that in The Shining Wendy is she's the powerful one. It doesn't seem like it. She seems out of control most of the film, but she's the one who lives in the end. She's the one who gets away. Jack is the man baby, he's the drunk, he's the little boy. He's totally out
of control. And well, there are traces, of course of female power throughout his filmography. But I argue that Miss Scott is the way that she's framed, the tone of her voice, which I think. I use the word orotund for her voice, which is good.
I thought about that.
I consternated over the right adjective for that for a while. But you know, she's probably in a two minutes and makes just in that two minutes all those other monkey boys look stupid and silly, which they definitely are. So I think I argue that really what Kubrick's doing, or at least what Kubrick's film mind is doing, is breaking masculinity over the calls again and again, satirizing it and really pointing out how horrible mena it's the white men.
Gosh yah, you think of the sterling Hayden character and just that what he lost in direction once and he lost his mind after that. Yeah, it had to be the floor i'be been the ones and the phallus, of course is.
I mean, it's so prominent as a symbolically imagistically in that film, but it runs throughout everything every film somebody always talking to recently. You could read that film as I do, in terms of the fallust, but you could also read it in the opposite terms every film, if only by absence or marginalization of women. You know, you could read the Monolith, for instance, in two thousand and one, is a big dick or a big womb, and you
could expand that to the whole of his filmography. It's all right there, And that's anyway, one of the reasons that he's so he's so good. I can't imagine that Kuper, you know, sat back one day and was like hmm. This is what I'm gonna do with my entire body of work. But it's ultimately a reflection that film Mind of course, which I perceive is separate, is really a reflection of coup. It's mind, of course, and boy, it's fascinating spectacular.
Does that film mind have a subconscious because I imagine that's where all these connections go.
That's what it's all about. Yes, I am reading what I think. I mean, I employed a little bit of psychoanalytics stuff, but I'm reading it as an unconscious representation of It's highly on Eric and dream like too, all of his films, even mostly subtly. Eyes Wide Shuts a great example, because it's something, okay, well this could happen. There's nothing, there's nothing crazy that happens there. But at the same time, you know, the whole thing is very much like a dream and of course based on Yes,
which means dream story right in German. So yes, for sure. And I'm usually quite interested in the unconscious. You can do anything with the unconscious, just say anything and figure it out. Nothing set in stone. Everything's kind of fluid and in motion, and it's a great sort of place base to theorize and have intellectual fun.
No, it is completely fun. And that's the thing that I enjoy this so much, because now we've got my mind reeling about clockbook ords and I'm just like, oh, yeah, the big fallis that Alex uses to attack that woman, or the weird relationship between the muscleman and the try the wine guy, you know, or.
Just they're just walking penises, right, there's completely bowlers are the head of the penis and yeah.
And then Alex with his cane and everything. I mean, yeah, it's a penis with a walking stick.
Yeah, from seeing it a million times, Like the first novel that I wrote was a sequel to it, ridiculously called I Alex, in which it never published, thankfully, and I even included like half of it was written in nadsat that language. Well, even today, I can't believe I think I say this in the book Kubrick. It was an insane act to try to make Burgess's novel into that film. I don't even know how that entered as mine, let alone how he imaginatively rendered it on the screen.
Like the drugs didn't wear outfits like that in the novel. That's not how they were described that's really his vision, and it's so in the language, which is so dense. I mean, it's wonderful. I love it, but it's so dense and playful, like who would read that and think make a movie out of this? It's correct, like making a movie out of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake or something. Although that's prays up been made no seas, yes, a couple of times, but not betting it's way Clockwork Orang's Remains
just blows me away every time. One thing I found just talking to Kubrick Folk there is a personal there's some figures, there's you keep your sort of personal investment in it distance, but with Gubricians there's a pretty consistent investment of the personal into their writing. How did you come to Koban? Were you young so later?
Yeah? Probably pretty young. I remember watching The Shining when I was way too young to see it, and we definitely watched a lot of Clock or Orange again, way too young. I was in high school at the time, so it really wasn't until you know, seeing things like the killing and being like oh okay, and I know I definitely saw two thousand and one, probably even before the killing, So yeah, a lot of these films I was familiar with before I really got into film scholarship.
But yeah, it goes together so naturally, and I completely agree with I think that's probably worth some of the adverse reactions to something like A Room two thirty seven, because that whole movie is about personal connections to shining and just you know. Even I remember the one woman talking about how our child had drawn a drawing that had a guy with his head split open and said, I have a splitting headache. And she's like, oh, and that reminded me of the image of you know, Deulbart
Grady or whatever with his head cut out. And I was like, that's valid. You know, it's your bringing your personal to this stuff. So I feel that it's a very natural marriage to bring the personal to the.
And yeah, I really enjoyed that film. By the way, I guess it's no different than what I'm doing in my book. I mean, that's what that's his reading, And it was fun to watch. I liked it. But like I remember seeing two thousand and one, for instance, for the first time, and I wasn't that young. It was in my twenties early twenties. I didn't know what was
going on in that fucking film. And it was only after I read the book Clark's novel that I realized, oh wow, this is pretty cool, and you know, Kubrick worked on it with him, and it had all you know. It was like a codebreaker for the film for me anyway, and it really enabled me to see the film in a new light in a way that A Clockwork Orange did but not I never I actually never read story. I don't think that AI was based on super Toys
Last All Summer. Yeah, but actually the A Clockwork Orange and two thousand and one, with their novels from which they're adapted, they speak to each other in a way that other core because I think, except for two films are not mistake any based all of his novel or story. But those two in particular really have a relationship with their source and deviate from the source and interesting ways. That makes for good discussion.
Yeah, And that's what I always love to do, is to go back to the source text and start to see how things have changed throughout and how that subconscious or even just the ego will speak to something and say, okay, now we need to make this change. Now, we need to make that change, and then you start to also see those themes that are brought to it just by the different people that are involved, or just that Kubrick film. Mind,
I love that concept. By the way, I definitely won't be rereading and then also probably bringing that to some other films as well.
I don't think anybody's applied. I read pretty extensively in film studies, but not as much in last year or two. But I've never seen Brampton's filmosophy apply to anything, so that was kind of new too, And earlier I said I don't agree with everything in that, at least in terms of it being functional mode of theory. One thing, if I remember correctly, he was interested in is it had to do with feelings and sort of applying motions and using emotions and feelings in a kind of theoretical
or critical way. I'm not conveying that properly, but something like that, and that didn't really resonate with me, but the general theory did, and now that I did it, I see it everywhere. You can apply it to any film, but some films are more receptive to it, let's say, than others. Films made by filmmakers like Kubrick, who are a highly intelligent and super attentive to. What I say in the book is style is a way of seeing.
So we've got the Minority report Book to look forward to for MEO, do you ever go it on that?
No? No, that one's already out. That came out, okay, two thousand and two.
Oh okay. For some reason I thought that that was the late I'm sorry if I'm misunderstood.
No, the one coming up is it's not a Scanner Darkly Richard Ladders of Scanner Darkly for University of Texas Press's relatively new series. It's called twenty first Century Film Essentials. And then the other one is the sprawling book on Philip. It's called the Auto slash Biographies of Philip K. Dick
Infinite Regressions. I'm under contract with me for that, and that's a study of all of his early biographical texts, biographies that have been written about him, three memoirs written about him by two of his wives and a friend of his, as well as creative work like Ekad inspired
stories and comic books. No one just came off called Ben Benjamin that I'm reading, which is pretty cool based on his life and then Dixon in autobiographical fiction, which came after he had that kind of visionary experience in the early seventies. I mentioned this in the kup Brick book. When I do a book, I really immerse myself in the content, try to kind of become that content as much as I can't. I've been more or less relegated to teaching online, so I'm in my condo a lot.
I have a lot of time to write, and I kind of treat it as an actor, back to a lot of years when I was younger, and I get into character, you know, and write it out. So I've been more in character with Philip K. Dick and Rich lank Ladder in the last year than Kubrick. But that's what I'm gonna do.
Yes, I remember that there was supposed to be a film called The Owl and Dlight. I think it was called, with Paul Giamatti playing Philip K. Dick, and I wonder if that script is out there floating around someplace.
I don't know about the script. I'm a co host on a podcast called that I started being coaxed about two years ago, called Dickhead's Podcast Nice and they would know the other two guys on the show would know better than me. The Owl in Daylight would have been the next novel that vote after, or he died before he could write it, But if I'm not mistaken, he had an outline for it, and then his ex wife, Tessa, who also wrote, and she's still alive, probably in her
eighties now. I actually interviewed her for one of my books and she wrote the on Daylight. Now, I'm pretty sure it was based on that outline. So I wonder whatever script's circling around, if that's based on her book, or somebody just went with the idea in the Owl of Daylight or what do you know?
I do not know. I remember it was supposed to be about Dick, so it might have been about the writing of that. I'm not sure what it was, but I just thought the idea of Paul Giamatti as Philip K. Dick, Yeah, please sign me up.
You' a big dickhead. He is a proud dickhead. Yeah. One of my cos David Agronoff is I think he's getting him on the show if you interviewed him. You've interviewed quite a few people.
No, I would love to talk to Giamatti, and especially he was in a pilot that never got picked up. He was playing Hoke Moseley, the Charles Williford character that was in The Miami Blues, played by Fred Ward. And then I was excited for like a revival of Hoke Moseley and it would have been a whole series, but fortunately it didn't happen. Now I got to do show I got to listen to. So thank you. I appreciate it,
and thank you for your time. This was great. I always love talking with you so much, and I love this new book and I'm excited to help spread the word about it because I think more people need to read this.
Well, thanks, I appreciate it.
Is there a good place for people to keep up on your work?
Just my website, dear on Wilson dot com and probably Instagram. I'm mostly on promoting on Instagram and Facebook, but I'm the editor in chief of Antieedpist Press as well, so I promote myself absolutely, but I have always been kind of uncomfortable with it, and I much prefer promoting other people, so I try to do quite a bit of that. But yeah, that's where I am.
Thank you so much. Sir, this is so great catching up with you.
Thank you Mike.
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