The End of the World with Michael and Stu

This week we are returning to Stanley Kubrick, tackling his late masterpiece, Eyes Wide Shut . We discuss its resonances with the ongoing (neverending?) Jeffrey Epstein scandal, while also getting into some of its Freudian themes. We discuss the film's relationship with its source material, Arthur Schnitzler's brilliant Traumnovelle , pointing out the specific sort of dream logic that an...

This week we are discussing the United State's "action" in Venezuela which led to the capture of President Nicolás Maduro. We go over the implications of this for US foreign policy moving forward, what this means for the future of Venezuela, while also touching briefly on the long history of that nation. Does this action imply a shift in the future of US global strategy? Is the US s...

This week we are talking about Stanley Kubrick's 1980 masterpiece,  The Shining . We get into Kubrick's famous "beef" with Stephen King, the author of the novel upon which the film is based, while also discussing the several angles of interpretation that have emerged over the forty five years since the film first premiered. Is the movie about the end of the world? You might not...

We did it. Somehow, we've made it to one hundred episodes. And this week we're going to celebrate by going over some of our favorite and least favorite movies from the first hundred, offering predictions on the future of American politics, and, most importantly, going through three of Michael's famed/hated hypotheticals. We even touch a bit on the afterlife. It's all here. Than...

This week we are tackling 2007's  I Am Legend , a film so bad not even Stu can pretend it is a "masterpiece." Much time is spent in pointing out the many problems with the main character's behaviors in the film (it stars Will Smith at the height of his powers), applying all we have learned from 99 episodes of examining end of the world scenarios. We also tear apart both equally...

This week we are revisiting a 2016 New Yorker  profile of Sam Altman by Tad Friend for insight into how we got where we now are with regards to AI and its seeming inescapable ubiquity. The article is quite revelatory, as it shows us Altman in a more nascent moment in his rise to "tech superstardom." And what do we find? A monomaniacal sociopath with dreams of infinite growth and little r...

This week we are discussing the Heaven's Gate cult, which famously brought about its own end through mass suicide in March of 1997 as the Hale-Bopp Comet sailed past the Earth. We discuss the group's origins in the "cultic milieu" of the early 1970s and compare it to other new religious movements of the time including Peoples Temple, The Manson Family, and EST. The group's...

This week we are considering Sidney Lumet's 1976 classic  Network . Written by acclaimed screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky and featuring an all-star cast, the film examines the breakdown of the supposed objectivity of the news media in an age of hyper-capitalism. A prophecy of things that would come to fruition decades after it was first released, Network remains relevant today for its extremely c...

This week we are tackling Kathryn Bigelow's 2025 film  A House of Dynamite which deals with one of our "favorite" nightmare scenarios, namely, a nuclear missile of unknown origin being fired at a major American city. We analyze the film's three part/three perspective structure and also discuss its controversial ending.  We open the episode by discussing some of the revelations...

This week we are charting some of the reactions (and overreactions) to last week's mayoral election in New York City wherein Zohran Mamdani emerged triumphant. Can Mamdani's campaign point the way for future Democratic Party successes, or is it an outlier that must be seen firmly in the context of deep blue New York City? We chart reactions from Third Way, Steve Bannon, Chuck Schumer, Da...

This week we're getting into Abel Ferrara's 2011 film 4:44 Last Day on Earth which follows an actor, Cisco (Willem DaFoe), and his painter partner, Skye (Shanyn Leigh), on....the last day on earth. With nods to some of our old favorites including Al Gore, the Norse conception of Ragnarok, as well as Joseph Campbell, the movie explores what two people go through when faced with the certai...

This week for Halloween we are covering "The Shadow over Innsmouth" by H.P. Lovecraft. We get into Lovecraft's troubling history of racism, showing how it works as a manifestation of the anxieties of white supremacist ideology. We also discuss the work of Mark Fisher, who has looked into Lovecraft's deployment of "the Weird." Lastly we consider Lovecraft's role i...

Is our genetic makeup our destiny, or is there someway we can overcome the code on which our bodies and minds are based? This is the question asked by this week's film, 1997's Gattaca, written and directed by Andrew Niccol. We get into the reality of the eugenics-obsessed world presented by this picture while pointing out some of the...other aspects of reality this single-minded focus on...

We're finally covering the Norse vision of the apocalypse, Ragnarök. We go over the Norse pantheon of gods, Odin, Thor, Loki, all your favorites, and then we get into some of the events that presage the coming of doom before plunging fully into that doom itself, particularly the tragic death of Baldr done by the coward Loki. We also get into some of the classic Norse apocalyptic monsters, Fen...

We're finally tackling 1981's Mad Max 2 or The Road Warrior. One of the most influential post-apocalyptic films of the last fifty years, it is also considered to be one of the greatest action movies of all time. So of course, Michael is ambivalent about it, and Stu is OUTRAGED by that ambivalence. By the end will our hosts reach some kind of accord, or will this be a friendship-ending ep...

This week we have bowed to pressure and are at last covering a 2013 National Geographic documentary called "How to Survive the End of the World: Zombie Earth." This is the first entry in a six part series to which we shall be returning periodically. The zombie apocalypse scenario set out in this infotainment feature is really about rabies, and not just regular, terrifying rabies, no. The...

At long last we are covering Ridley Scott's 1979 masterpiece  Alien . We go over how the film is really about, surprise, capitalism, and how the ultimate aim of capitalism is to discover the perfect war-making commodity, in this case, a merciless killing machine unburdened by illusions of "morality," as one character puts it. Great movie, really fun to discuss, and we were even join...

This week we are talking about 2022's Triangle of Sadness . Directed by Ruben Östlund, the movie looks at class divisions in three stages, zooming out from the troubles in an individual romantic relationship, then looking at class as it works on a luxury cruise, before finally depicting a kind of post-apocalyptic, Lord-of-the-Flies- with-adults situation on a seemingly deserted island. Beauti...

We've gone back to a total classic of the apocalypse genre, Terminator 2: Judgment Day , to mark our return from our "brief sojourn" in the realms of the afterlife. We get into all sorts of stuff about childhood traumas caused by the film, the desirability of voiceover in movies, the ATM-hacking skills of young John Connor; it's all here.  We open the episode by discussing the...

In the final installment (for now) of our afterlife miniseries, we are considering the ancient Vedic Religion, the ancestor of modern Hinduism which arose in northwestern India in the second millennium BCE. We talk about the idea of being reincarnated in other realms (as opposed to in this world), and the different factors that might alter the realm in which one finds oneself. We also get into var...

Moving in a parallel direction to our last topic, we are going over the afterlife beliefs of the Ancient Egyptians this week, touching on mummification, the pyramid texts, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the elusive Field of Reeds. We compare the classless afterlife of the Mesopotamians to the highly stratified beliefs of the Egyptians, while also noting that, for the first time in our series o...

It's part three of our foray into the history of the afterlife, this time with a focus on Ancient Mesopotamia and the legendary Epic of Gilgamesh. We go over the conception of the afterlife presented in the poem, which is very egalitarian if not very comforting, and we then move on to consider the second half of the tale, which focuses on Gilgamesh's attempt to achieve immortality.  This...

In the second installment of our afterlife miniseries we delve into the prehistoric realms, discussing the earliest evidence we have for some kind of a belief in the afterlife in prehistoric, neolithic peoples. We also consider the Neanderthal and Denisovans, cave paintings, early totemic art, and the practices of ceremonial burial. We also touch on Göbekli Tepe and other early ritual sites and en...

This week we are deviating from our normal subject matter slightly in covering Albert Brooks's wonderful 1991 film Defending Your Life as a way of introducing the miniseries we'll be running for the next month. The afterlife seems like a natural corollary to the show's typical focus on the end of the world, and Brooks's film felt like a good way in, as it explores a secular vis...

This week we are discussing right-wing paranoia about weather control and how it is being used as a comforting belief that enables one to evade accepting the reality of human influenced climate change. We go through the history of the "chemtrails" conspiracy theory, while also situating it in the earlier (and much more interesting) beliefs of Viennese Psychiatrist turned out-of-the-box t...