In our first episode of 2025, we get inspired by Anthony Galluzzo’s Against the Vortex to watch the cult 1974 movie Zardoz, featuring Sean Connery in what appears to be a prototype for the mankini.
OK, you guys just convinced me to order Anthony’s book and to watch Zardoz. I’m intrigued by the connection Dougald made between what that book is doing and what Elias and Pete are up to with The Lost Prophets Podcast: returning to a prior moment when what now seem like foreclosed alternatives still looked like living possibilities. Something like Marc Andreessen's “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, by contrast, strikes me as a doubling-down on the status quo ideologies which have created modernity rather than any authentic re-imagining of its terms and premises.
The two of you happened to hit on one of my favorite movies. I'm old enough that I was an adult when Zardoz was first released. My main reaction at the time was to ask with some astonishment, how did this movie get made? Did a studio suit green light it without having any clue what Boorman really had in mind? It was a time when many ground-breaking, now classic movies were being made, but Zardoz is in a category all its own. Make what you will of the "politics", sexual, cultural, of the film, nobody in the movie business was dealing with so many issues that now seem so relevant to our current set of crises. If they were, it was sensationalistic, like the Mad Max films from a few years later. It remains a film that you either get or don't get; most people can't get past Connery's fetching outfit. Too bad, because the film has real literary panache, and intellectual heft.
Have either of you read Robert Graves novel, Watch the North Wind Rise? It has a similar theme, a future "utopia" based on the worship of Graves' White Goddess, run by empowered women. A scientist summons a man from the barbaric past--the first half of the 20th century--to inject new life into what has become a social system so attuned to the bovine in human nature that the future promises only eons of the most crushing stasis and ennui.
Both that book and Zardoz are good reminders that, as we hope and dream of a new and better future, those dreams once realized will eventually become the next set of problems to be overcome, by other hopes and dreams.... And so we go on....
OK, you guys just convinced me to order Anthony’s book and to watch Zardoz. I’m intrigued by the connection Dougald made between what that book is doing and what Elias and Pete are up to with The Lost Prophets Podcast: returning to a prior moment when what now seem like foreclosed alternatives still looked like living possibilities. Something like Marc Andreessen's “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, by contrast, strikes me as a doubling-down on the status quo ideologies which have created modernity rather than any authentic re-imagining of its terms and premises.
Really interesting conversation.
The two of you happened to hit on one of my favorite movies. I'm old enough that I was an adult when Zardoz was first released. My main reaction at the time was to ask with some astonishment, how did this movie get made? Did a studio suit green light it without having any clue what Boorman really had in mind? It was a time when many ground-breaking, now classic movies were being made, but Zardoz is in a category all its own. Make what you will of the "politics", sexual, cultural, of the film, nobody in the movie business was dealing with so many issues that now seem so relevant to our current set of crises. If they were, it was sensationalistic, like the Mad Max films from a few years later. It remains a film that you either get or don't get; most people can't get past Connery's fetching outfit. Too bad, because the film has real literary panache, and intellectual heft.
Have either of you read Robert Graves novel, Watch the North Wind Rise? It has a similar theme, a future "utopia" based on the worship of Graves' White Goddess, run by empowered women. A scientist summons a man from the barbaric past--the first half of the 20th century--to inject new life into what has become a social system so attuned to the bovine in human nature that the future promises only eons of the most crushing stasis and ennui.
Both that book and Zardoz are good reminders that, as we hope and dream of a new and better future, those dreams once realized will eventually become the next set of problems to be overcome, by other hopes and dreams.... And so we go on....