5 Star Tossers

Hello listener, and welcome! This episode got a little bit out of hand. Treating of the MCU's metaphysical maneuvering, we had to go deep into the bad air of ressentiment... Availing ourselves to Nietzsche, which sounds reasonable, had unfortunately gone to Sagi's head, who proceeded to channel the poor moustached genius throughout. And then a hammer became involved... Unfortunate. We ar...

Perhaps geared to the most niche part of our listener, in this episode we discuss the bruising and celebrated video game stylings of the company From Software and its auteur creative designer Hidetaka Miyazaki. Jesus returns for the proceedings! Specifically, we discuss the moral imperative YouTubers praise in games such as Elden Ring, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Dark Souls I, II, III. These games are...

Why can't we all just side with one another in the pain of the signifier? Hello again listener! From the flu-ish depths comes at you an almost  contagion-free installment of the Tossers, this time dedicated to Merriam-Webster's 2022 'Word of the Year': Gaslighting. We also have a first-time guest, Andrew, a master summarizer of whom we are still in awe. We introduce the term th...

In this episode we discuss the new horror film Barbarian. Marx Grudge returns as we think about the horrors of private property, specifically the home and real estate. We reference a blog post by the scholar Jason Read to follow this track, while trying our best to tie the thread of property relations to he other thread that runs through the movie: sexual difference and its constituent violence. T...

Hello faithful listener! This Tossers episode tries to air-out the particularly pungent elements in the bad-air Ressentiment of 'Inceldom.' The incel, in our approach, may indicate the site of real pain and therefore allow insight for the very real crisis of heterosexual masculinity, its burning need of transvaluing behaviors that society can no longer abide.  Certainly not for the faint...

They say that one of the high-society ladies that was familiar with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (and his character) said, after he died, that he was an intriguing madman.   In this episode, we delve head first into Nathan Fielder's foldy-folds, whether torture chambers, traps, or some choice slices of life (if you look there you can see Nathan's symptom holding the machete). Between the sketch...

Once again, we had to shove way too many words into our title, but we swear, we touch on all of these figures in our long awaited return from Summer Break. Cutting into David Cronenberg's new film "Crimes of the Future," we append ourselves to Paul Preciado's Testo Junkie and Jacques Derrida's Beast and Sovereign: Seminar I . An overarching question we ask is whether this...

In this episode we discuss the 2011 Quentin Dupieux film Rubber . It's the story of a killer tire. Jake suggested this movie after reading Eugenie Brinkema's affect-breaking book Life-Destroying Diagrams . She is all about the horror of form or the form of horror. The thing is, Sagi and Jack found the movie pointless--but isn't that the point of having a tire (a circle, a hole) be t...

Hello everyone! You're still here?! This podcast we're discussing and dissecting Tiger, a 2021 HBO mini-series about the rise and Fall of Tiger Phallus.. sorry, I mean Tiger Woods . Tiger's superhuman abilities are analyzed from an Oedipus Complex angle, leading us to speculate about how Earl (and his wife) had tweaked its mechanism to create the perfect golfing machine; the kind th...

Oh boy. Jack introduced us to To Catch A Predator. So we try to define Perverted Justice, which is the name of the STING company that catches the predators. Jesus makes a cameo, there's some Derrida, and a whole bunch of Americana sanctimony.  We try not to spend too much time imitating Chris Hansen's voice.  https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9

In this slightly longer episode we tackle Gillian Flynn's and David Fincher's Gone Girl (2014), as a heteronormative woman's violent breakaway from a 'type' that she feels pulled towards in her marriage - unusual, impolite, homicidal, spectacular. Channeling Valerie Solanas' Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM) - allowing this monstrosity to unfold on its own terms - rev...

We thought to explore various kill-shots in the video arena. Come one come all and listen as serious discussions of Freud's death-drive and Japanese Orientalism devolve into a mayhem of body parts and Semen. We tried to go beyond the pleasure principle, where no man had gone before, but some of us gripped firmly unto the edge and would not release. It all spun out of control Pervs R' Us...

Sagi introduces us to the world of scambaiting, where YouTube content creators scam scammers. We discuss the dubious ethics of these scambaiters and compare it to the Hacker Ethos of free information. We defend the honor of the Indian scammers who get scammed and the Grandmas who these scambaiters often pretend to be.  We also fess up about some scams we have fallen for.  There's lots of Marx...

In this glorious installment we will be continuing our actor/acting thematic, this time thinking of Franz Kafka's 1922 short story Ein Hungerkünstler .  Slog along as we  tarry a bit over the slim, somewhat Marxist contribution of the character's Pathos with regards to the reactionary-soporific functions of the Theater.  But then, rejoice with the tragic overabundance of life, as we  bro...

The Tossers obsess over the final scene of a Seinfeld episode (Season 6, Episode 23), where an actor bombs on stage and begs the audience to let her start again. Why, we wonder, is it impossible for her to start again? Why is the audience so cruel? Maybe she can start again? Along the way, we discuss Shakespeare, Hannah Gadsby, Aristotle's Catharsis, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualit...

5 Star Tossers throw up their first video game toss, focusing on Bioshock Infinite, the 3rd installation of the Bioshock series. They debate whether there's racism in the way the Black uprising is portrayed. They also get lost in the pleasure they take in gameplay, wondering whether a video game's story is all that important.  https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/...

Tossers turn to Julia Kristeva's abject to think about how repellant Megan Fox actually is in the 2009 film Jennifer's Body. Does she upset the hipster male gaze of the band Low Shoulder, or does she confirm its innermost secret? We also reference the SNL clip called The Librarian with Margot Robbie. https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9

5 Star Tossers throw some Hegel and Isaiah Berlin at you, in the name of freedom.  There's Positive Freedom, Negative Freedom, Absolute Freedom, and then the Good Ole' U.S. of A brand: don't tread on my property. Oh yeah, this is all framed around the Always Sunny in Philadelphia Episode entitled "Charlie Goes America All Over Everybody's Asses" https://app.databyss.o...

5 Star Tossers try to make sense of the Paul Verhoeven "Masterpiece of Shit" "Showgirls." Did we? We sure wrestled over it, and we churned out some humiliating memories, some Marxist feminist theories à la Silvia Federici, a hypothesis about the difference between satirizing violence and satirizing sex, a theory of the hoax, and we introduce Deleuze's cinematic concept &qu...

This week The 5 Star Tossers look at the cultural phenomenon that is the Golden Buzzer from America's Got Talent. We do a shallow deep dive into Kant's Critique of Judgment to think about the Christian humanism at the heart of any universal celebration of beauty and talent. We also introduce for the first time our Star il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais, so expect some Saussurean talk abou...

The Five Star Tossers joyfully lambaste the Béla Tarr movie The Turin Horse. This leads them to think about what happens when you try to mash Marxist and Nietzschean ideas together. https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9

We discuss Eyes Wide Shut from a psychoanalytic angle. Specifically, we discuss the closing line of the movie by way Jacques Lacan's provocative statement that "There is No Sexual Relation." Here is the link to Jake's Databyss notes for the Podcast:  https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9

We look at Werner Herzog's fascinating film Grizzly Man. Herzog compiles and analyzes the footage Timothy Treadwell filmed when he traveled to Alaska each summer for 13 years to live with Grizzly bears. We think about the colonizing tendencies in both Herzog and Treadwell, and discuss, via Jacques Derrida, the fabled relation between man and animal. Jake's Databyss notes: https://app.dat...

Watching the movie Futurama, Sagi develops a theory about the distinction between the Jew and the Christian. Jake tries to connect this theme to the Polyp and the material gags of comedy. We refer to the following Databyss page throughout the podcast, it's basically our notes: https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9

The 5 Star Tossers analyze They Live, via Zizek, via Marx, and via their own star Marx Grudge https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9