One airbrushed wizard van short of a new religion. Mike Jones is back once again. Can we build a bewildering manifesto-inscribed labyrinth and spiritual movement around J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion? What cult LARPing lessons can we learn from Kurt Anderson’s Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire? Is America the BoJack Horseman of countries? All this plus a Denny’s kids’ menu and a pack of crayons.
Yeah, it’s one of the more pop culture-heavy episodes.
Intro music by Martin H Emes and “Rah” by Uncle Milk (CC BY 4.0). Closing track is “Soft Rain” by Glass Boy (CC BY-ND 3.0).
Transcript
Opening
Distorted Voices: Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern … all future generations are at stake in this battle … failure of crops … rivers and streams serve as sewers and dumping grounds … the impacts of global climate change are already being felt …
Jeremy: This isn’t the way it has to be. It doesn’t have to be the end. There’s still time. It’s Now or Never. Let’s try again.
Season 2 Episode 3: Cult of Ilúvatar with Mike Jones.
We’ll talk labyrinths, cult LARPing, building a religion around J. R. R. Tolkien’s elvish Old Testament, The Silmarillion, dissuading zealots, and the canonization of Tommy Westphall, Secret Creator of the Universe — or maybe just the TV universe.
Join us on Twitch for live episode recordings, Sundays at 6:30 Eastern Time, 3:30 Pacific. Call in during the show or leave a message anytime at our toll free number: 844-9161-NOW. (That’s 844-916-1669.)
National Geographic says bumblebee populations are plummeting. Fuckin’… bumblebees.
Anyway.
The Actual Episode Stuff
Jeremy: Here with Michael Jones for his fourth appearance on the podcast.
Mike: Oh shit. Are we going to get famous?
Jeremy: We’re definitely going to get famous.
Mike: I was talking to a coworker the other day about those people who make millions of dollars unwrapping toys on YouTube.
Jeremy: Those fucking assholes. I wish I could be them.
Mike: I know. I’m like, why am I making coffee for people who hate me?
Jeremy: And then now we talk about bummer news. Oh, the ocean is boiling microplastics and all the birds are dead. They’re dead.
Mike: Is that the remants of democracy I see floating amongst the detritus?
Jeremy: Ah, yeah. Do you want to talk about how we’re a fascism?
Mike: Why would you need witnesses in a trial of any kind? Can we just have judge Marilyn Milian come in. Or like, Judge Judy?
Jeremy: Judge Judy. Yes. Oh fuck. I forgot to turn off my AC.
Mike: This is very unprofessional.
Jeremy: The thing I like about having to turn off my AC when I’m recording is it brings the whole climate change thing to a sensory level. As the episode progresses, I’m getting hotter and hotter until eventually I personally collapse, bodily, and the show’s over.
Mike: Wasn’t that movie mother! About climate change? Couldn’t they just show like a person in a hot room with the AC off instead of just like an uncomfortable amount of people surrounding Jennifer Lawrence in a tiny room.
Jeremy: So you did read my script for mother! 2.
Oh, yeah. Last episode we talked about this book. I just got it from the library Underland. So I saw the cover and I was like, whoa, this cover is groovy. And then I realized it was the book I was talking about.
Also, I just got gifted this Awaiting the Collapse by Paul Kirchner, and uh, it’s like psychedelic stoner comics. Shout out to Crystal and Paul for gifting me this. It’s signed and there’s a little doodle from the artist. This is like a treasure now
Mike: Oh, cool.
Jeremy: It’s really good. It’s like a skeleton cowboy having surreal adventures.
Mike: I’m into that.
Jeremy: Yeah.
Do you want to talk about cult shit? Do you want to invent a cult? What would your cult be?
Mike: Fuck, I don’t know what my cult would be. I one time played in a post-apocalyptic tabletop RPG and the conceit of my character was it sometime after the apocalypse, my character had burned himself out completely on drugs and didn’t know what reality was anymore and then he found a copy of The Silmarillion and used it as a Holy text and created this cult based on The Silmarillion, as if it was an actual religious slash historical document. it’s fleshed out. It’s comprehensive. Glowing trees, giant spiders, shiny jewels, gods cursing people, floating islands. There’s a lot going on in that book. I love it. I would read it again. I probably will read it again.
Jeremy: I did actually read The Silmarillion a million years ago. I think I was in high school, and I was like, I’m going to start the Lord of the Rings at the very beginning. So I started with the prequels, which you should never do, and I only remember it was a really boring, and there were some shiny jewels that everyone wanted. I do like the musical creation story though. I thought that was pretty dope.
Mike: Yeah. About how Elf Satan, basically, was like “I don’t like this. Let’s sing a different tune.”
Did I ever tell you that there’s a restaurant down the street from my apartment that is run by a cult?
Jeremy: That sounds cool. What do they have?
Mike: They have sandwiches. They have craft sodas and also, a really harsh interpretation of Christianity where if a child is born to the cult, it’s taken away from its parents and put in a little with the other children and is raised by a teacher, not by its parents, and the parents don’t have any interaction with the kids, you have to work in the field, you’re not allowed to eat anything, can’t have any contact with the outside world …
Jeremy: They also have chips.
Mike: I mean, they do . Your sandwich comes with some chips.
Jeremy: So it can’t be all bad.
Mike: The thing about it though, if you Google it, there was some post that was talking about, ” oh, just so you know, people who are in the Yellow Deli cult don’t actually get to eat the food that they serve to you at the Yellow Deli. They’re serving you that food so that you’ll talk to them so that they can join the cult so that you can make that food to give it to more people so that you can turn the cult.
There’s like some story about a woman who was in a really hard like place in her life and people Shanghaied her into this cult. She didn’t know what she was getting herself into, and then she tried to leave. They held her against her will and she had to make up some story about needing something from a store, but she had somehow gotten a hold of a friend of hers to be there at a certain time so she could jump in the car and. Be driven away while the cult people chased her down.
We were looking all this up as we had already ordered and we’re waiting for our food. And then we decided after these pretty gross sandwiches, let’s never eat here again. But it’s right down the street, if you ever come to visit and you want to go.
Jeremy: Oh, sounds great. You’re really selling me on it.
Mike: The one thing about it though, is the atmosphere of the building and the restaurant itself is actually really cool. Like, it’s a cool little spot. The staff are really, really creepy, but the actual building is really cool. So I mean…
Jeremy: So they have the good architecture down. Eric was insistent that cults need good architecture, which I would also include, like interior design, general aesthetics.
Mike: Mmhmm. It’s like a Hobbit hole. It’s really homey and cozy and nice, but the people are soulless automatons who don’t really talk to you other than to take your order. And if you’re a gay couple, like we just so happen to be, and you hold hands while you’re at the table, they scowl at you a lot. So that’s fun.
Jeremy: Oh, fuck that. That’s a bad cult.
Mike: Yeah, that’s not a very fun cult. I don’t think any of them has read The Silmarillion.
Jeremy: well, that’s their first mistake and most egregious sin.
Mike: I mean, everything else I can forgive.
Jeremy: So your Silmarillion cult, would it have any interesting rituals based on the lore of Middle Earth?
Mike: I think so. Something is coming to my memory from The Silmarillion then about a time when all of the Valor, the gods, just got together in their little city and did something. I don’t remember. But I remember the goddess who’s like in charge of nature and trees and stuff was, did like a dance on this grassy hill, so maybe at some point there would be a festival where people were elected to be, to sort of like Mardi Gras, how there’s King and queen of Mardi Gras or whatever. There’s, there’ll be people like, Oh, you’re going to be the Manwe Sulimo of this year’s festival. You’re the King of the gods, what you say goes, and so on and so forth. And whoever is the Yavanna would have to do like a little nature dance among some trees. Maybe.
Jeremy: It sounds like you got it all worked out.
Mike: I. Yeah. Mmhmm. It’s fine.
Jeremy: All right. Sign up. I’m in.
Mike: We’d send out the lesser members of the cult to ensorcel the hearts and minds of any elf Lords they might happen to encounter while they’re out in the forest. Keep them in a trance for two hundred years.
Jeremy: I do enjoy ensorceling.
Mike: I thought I thought maybe that would pique your interest. Anytime I can get a good ensorceling living in, I count that a productive day.
Jeremy: I can’t go to sleep unless I ensorcel at least once.
Mike: At least.
Jeremy: If anyone feels like calling in the lines are open, what fucking number is it, toll free number 844-916-1669. Which has the word “now” in it. I spent so long trying to pick the right number to use that would contain the word “now” on those phone key pads that no one sees or uses or cares about anymore.
Mike: I dunno that they don’t care about it because there’s that one commercial that has that jingle that’s like 800-588…
Jeremy: 2-300-EMPIRE.
Mike: That’s it. See, you know.
Jeremy: I hope whoever made them that song got paid a lot of money because it’s terrible black magic that burned it permanently into my brain.
Mike: We need to find this person and get their help on the whole cult venture.
Jeremy: Yeah, that’s a good idea. Maybe just the right song would be the most effective recruiting tool.
Mike: Just drive down the street in a black van with speakers on top belting out the cult song that we come up with.
Jeremy: You’re not a legit cult unless you own at least one windowless van.
Mike: But I feel like with the budget that we probably have, it would have to be a used eighties van that has an airbrushed wizard on the side.
Jeremy: Hell yeah. That would save us the trouble of airbrushing our own wizard.
Mike: Exactly my thoughts.
Jeremy: Your idea’s already more thought out than mine is.
Mike: My cult idea puts too much of a threat to your own.
Jeremy: If I could implore any of my followers to kill some sort of celebrity for the notoriety and or to start a race war. Was that what the Helter Skelter, was that … The whole Charles Manson thing was all about? It was like he wanted to start a race war so sent people to kill Sharon Tate so they would think black people did it…? I don’t know if I’m remembering this right.
He was a
Mike: I don’t know. I don’t actually know a whole lot of the culty stuff or like serial killers. I know that’s in vogue right now, but I’ve never gotten super into it.
Jeremy: Yeah, it’s not, it’s not like a happy thing. I’ve seen my fair share of documentaries and I’m always just like, Oh, that’s fucked up. Why am I still watching this? Why am I watching another episode? I did. I only listened to the first season of serial though, and then like two episodes of the next season and I was like, Hmm, it’s not as good.
Mike: And I never listened to serial, but I did listen to Shit-Town.
Jeremy: Oh, Shit-Town was so good.
Mike: It was so good. All the crazy turns. I brought it up with somebody after I moved down here, I was like, Oh, have you heard of this podcast S-Town? And she turned to me and she was just like, “Whatever happened to the treasure?!” I know, I mean, will we ever know?
Yeah let’s go into the labyrinth or whatever he had. Though it wasn’t — I saw pictures of it — it wasn’t actually super impressive. I mean, it was big, but the walls were so short, you could like step over the walls.
Jeremy: Every time I’m like “Oh, there’s a labyrinth here, let’s go check it out,” it’s just some lines on the ground. There’s no David Bowie. Most corn mazes are actually more impressive.
Mike: It’s just a Denny’s kid’s menu and a pack of crayons in the middle of a field.
Jeremy: So we should make a labyrinth cult then, right? To actually make a bitching-ass labyrinth of some kind.
Mike: Oh, the text of the manifesto of the cult, could be inscribed on the walls of the labyrinth.
Jeremy: Oh yeah. So you have to read it while you’re going through.
Mike: Yeah. But it’s so nonsensical that you wouldn’t be able to… There would be no hints. You wouldn’t be able to be like, Oh, I’m following the logical through-line of this text and that’s going to lead me through the labyrinth. No, it would just be lunacy at every turn . It would have to be as disorienting as the labyrinth itself.
Jeremy: There were some big treasure hunty things… Like a book came out a couple of decades ago that had that these incredibly arcane clues for some kind of treasure hunt , never got officially solved, the author died or something like that. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Mike: No, I don’t.
Jeremy: It’s called The Secret. It’s not the one where you wish good things to happen to you. It’s called The Secret, came out in 1982. There’s some good YouTube about it. I’ll link you to them at some point.
Mike: There was something similar that it was like a series of blog posts and websites that had been set up that linked to each other and that created like this narrative. It was meant almost to be like sort of like a Blair Witch thing, like found footage, but it was in the form of blog posts and websites and that kind of thing that documented people’s experiences with, I think it was a house, in the same way that House of Leaves is, you know… Some, like, insane man talking about a house and all his different writings stitched together.
I like the idea of any kind of a narrative that can like that you have to do something in the real world to sort of interact with it. Like, I’m going to go to this website or it’s going to leave me on, like you mentioned, this scavenger hunt, any kind of thing where it’s like not just sitting in a room, reading a book or a website.
Jeremy: There was a while, I feel like, in the early 2000 or, somewhere in the 2000s, before the 2010s — what do you call the zone where it’s like 2000-2010? The oughts?
Mike: I’ve heard it called the oughts.
Jeremy: I hate it. I don’t know what else to call it though. So during that 10 year stretch of time , there was a big ARG thing, alternate reality games like Halo had one. There was like a Matrix on that didn’t go anywhere that I think was an official Matrix one. But it was kind of a cool concept, and I actually, I did an internship for an author in college where I pitched doing an ARG for his book. And, we had this, we had like the first couple stages worked out, so we put a bunch of clues hidden in copies of his book and we set up this event where he was doing his talk about his book and one copy was purchased and it didn’t have the clue in it.. So just like, god damn it, what do we do now? It just got derailed and then we all graduated and it didn’t go anywhere, but I was into the concept.
Mike: You should’ve put the clue one at the top of the stack.
Jeremy: We did. I don’t know what happened.
So I’m kind of interested in this blending of real and fictitious. I just finished this book, Fantasyland, about how America is basically founded on bullshit and it’s only gotten worse. Like we were created by some smart dudes at a bar trying to figure out how to make sure the insane fundamentalist Christians wouldn’t get their way all of the time and just elect like a fucking American Pope. And then we went through like the whole New Age thing and Disney… There was a whole chapter about Disney. The tone of the book was kind of cynical and, I guess I get it, he’s basically writing about bullshit, but, I kind of got got from it how kind of interesting this blend that we’ve invented between reality and fiction is. I don’t remember the author’s name, I’ll have to put it in the show notes or whatever, but he writes about how the whole main street USA in Disneyland started, the suburbs basically. There was like, here’s this fake street that we created to look like a certain idea of what a time was like, that never really existed in that form. And then the suburbs happened and they were kind of like, yeah, let’s make it look like this is the normal way things are. And then there’s that, I think it’s called Celebration, that engineered town in Disneyworld or just outside of…
Mike: Oh, in Florida.
Jeremy: You heard about that?
Mike: Yeah, yeah.
Jeremy: So there’s this weird spectrum between, where like the fiction feeds into the reality. I mean, and now we’re living in the most postmodern possible time where the President is quoting Fox News as if it were true and then Fox news is reporting that the president said it, and then it just sort of becomes accepted fact because of this weird feedback mechanism.
I guess what I’m trying to edge towards is like… I feel like the smart thing to do for some kind of postmodern cult would be to just embrace the fact that you’re LARPing at the beginning, to LARP the whole cult mythology and the robes, or however you want to do it, and just kind of treat it like a game or an art project. But you can build an ARG into it or something like that. People are just hungry for some entertainment.
Mike: I think, though, the issue with that would be, and I don’t know if it’s a feature or a bug, but at a very early point, there would definitely be a lot of people who come at it not in a LARPing way, but in a “this is definitely the real thing” way.
Jeremy: Yeah.
Mike: It would, for sure, escalate to that in a very short period of time. People would latch onto it, you know, clinging to whatever thing they think is going to offer them some kind of escape or purpose that they think this is going to offer them and they’ll just run with it.
Jeremy: We just have to make a fund where people who start taking it way too seriously, we just buy them a CrossFit membership and we’re like, “Here, this is your religion now. Knock yourself out. Be one of these guys. You might get rhabdo. That’s like the worst case scenario, but you’re probably not gonna blow up a building by taking it too seriously.”
Mike: You and the girl from the Peloton commercial can hang out together.
Jeremy: Just spend a couple of hundred bucks on Herbalife, get all that stuff, and then realize over the course of a few months what a terrible investment it was, and then, you know, be disillusioned and then just keep going on with your life or whatever.
Mike: Then join Amway after that …
Jeremy: Cutco.
Mike: Yeah … Cutco.
Jeremy: Pampered Chef… There’s gotta be someone that’s literally tried every one of these pyramids schemes, you know what I mean? And every time it’s just like “Well, this one’s different!”
Mike: It’s so strange to me that — and it makes sense that the people who engineered it would do it but — that something that, on the surface, is just like “Would you like to buy a knife?” becomes “Oh, these are the rules by which I live my life. This is the what I will and won’t allow myself to do. This is the code by which I operate in my existence.” It’s so strange.
Jeremy: “This is the very foundation of my identity now: selling makeup for Mary Kay. It’s on my car. It’s everything I put on Facebook now. My mother isn’t my friend on Facebook anymore because of this. But you have to make sacrifices in order to be successful.”
It’s so American. It’s like the most American religion in existence is the pyramid scheme.
Mike: It’s lunacy.
Jeremy: So instead of doing that … I was thinking about like how not to accidentally become a terrible cult, because even if your intentions are good when you start, you have to avoid being co-opted by more charismatic… like how the SDS winds up kind of just being taken over by the Weather Underground and then they just turn into douchebags and start blowing stuff up without really having a plan or anything.
So I was thinking you structure it as something disposable. You have like one year, and the leader is a mask or a costume or something, and you sort of democratically decide who is going to wear the mask and nobody treats that person like they’re the leader. The leader is the character they’re doing. And within that year they get to come up with these new forms of ritual. I mean, they can be based on a pattern or whatever that gets repeated, or you can kind of open source it, but you have to bring something new to the, you have to treat it like some kind of performance art. And so for a year we’re following that form of that character or whatever, and at the end of it, it’s destroyed. The costume or the mask is ceremonially set on fire or burned or the destruction can even be a ritual. And then a new person is selected to create and wear a mask to embody whatever new form of god or spirit or groovy mushroom alien, or however they want to do that. So it’s always just like there’s an expiration date… The highest taboo is hanging onto the same mask or the same character in the next year, or keeping the same person for more than one term or something and then tying it to an actual annual cycle. You’re tying it to seasons or something like that. I think that would have a tendency to discourage trying to keep the same thing going. It has a natural expiration date.
What do you think about that?
Mike: I liked the idea in general. If it is a democratic process that, you know, gets the next person elected, and not just like a random lottery, then I feel like eventually there would be, you know, people campaigning to become the next Mask and somebody could very easily campaign on “I’m just going to do the exact same thing the last person did.”
Jeremy: No, it should be a lottery. You’re absolutely right. That also kind of unconsciously makes everyone understand that at some point they may have to be God, and so like on some level they’re thinking like, “Well, when I play God, what’s my God play going to be like? What’s my God art going to be?”
It’s kind of like how now that I’ve been fucking around with podcasts, I listen to podcasts differently. There’s a lot more that I appreciate or, like I’ve started hearing cuts like, “Oh, they cut that, he was about to say something else” or something like that. Like, I love it. I’m just glimpsing behind the scenes a little bit or hearing choices that they’re making and so it’s like that. If you know you have to do the art too, it brings your attention to the art that you’re participating in in a different way. Nobody’s just an observer because you all could be called upon to do the next thing.
Mike: Yeah. I like that. The fact that it would be a random lottery, I think could lend some perceived legitimacy to the person who’s chosen. “Oh, they weren’t chosen by the hand of man. They were chosen by the spirit that they are to become.”
Jeremy: “The sacred rhizome has selected you. You’ve been plugged into the, the network…”
I’m back to the mushroom symbol. The last episode is all about mushrooms, and I’m like, I feel like there’s something here. There’s some, some kind of mushrooms symbol. I guess that would be mine if I get selected by lottery at some point. There would be some kind of mushroom involved. I mean, you could have a big fucking hat. That would just be fun.
Mike: You can drape yourself in robes that look like that gross fungus that’s all over everything in the Super Mario Brothers movie.
Jeremy: We talked about mushrooms for like an hour and 45 minutes, Glenn and I, last week, but we never mentioned the Super Mario Brothers movie where the Mario brothers are literally being led along and helped by like a secret mushroom intelligence.
Mike: Yeah. A secret mushroom king.
Jeremy: Yeah. The once and returning king.
Mike: Who just is fungus and is everywhere.
Jeremy: Hell yeah. I even brought up Toad from the Super Mario Brothers and I still didn’t fucking make the connection to the movie. And I love that movie. It’s such a fucking, like, how did that get made? It’s insane.
Mike: Oh, it’s a trip. For the longest time, the thing that stuck with me the most is when there’s a kindly old lady and then she pulls a gun on them and says, I need Koopa Coins. Like, okay, lady. We all need coins.
Jeremy: Just like the game.
I know Caleb would be into a Lord of the Rings cult. Caleb from one of the procreation episodes. He’d be down for a Lord of the Rings cult, probably.
I also really like the idea of applying some kind of holocratic principles. I don’t think it should just be a cult. You should have the ability to have sub-cults or connected cults. Somehow removing the focus on one discreet entity. Anyone could start their own cult holon group and they could be kind of interrelated. It doesn’t have to be like a mutually exclusive type thing. That could be like interest groups or working groups or something is like sub-cults or other cults.
Mike: I feel like the sub-cult idea plays well with my Silmarillion cult ’cause there’s like 12 gods. Ooh, I’m liking this Let’s write this down. I want to start this cult.
Jeremy: We should be recording this in some form.
Mike: I know! That would be really convenient.
A cult doesn’t have to be bad, right? A cult can be good.
Jeremy: [Laughs]
Mike: Because like the gods, the Valor in the Silmarillion, there’s one that’s all about wind and birds and there’s one that’s all about the sea and there’s one well I mean there’s there’s one that’s like about death.
Jeremy: That one might be kind of a bummer.
Mike: Well he’s kinda, like, he’ll like help you get reincarnated if you’re an elf. And if you’re a human he’s just like “bye!” as your spirit flies away to wherever human spirits go.
I feel like the Silmarillion cult could generally be a good thing because you can have your little sub-cults that are each focused on a different cause. The cult of Varda the goddess of the stars can be all about combating light pollution and things like that.
So let’s do it. Sunrise Movement, and get out of the way. We’ve got the children of Eru Ilúvatar. Let’s get in touch with Gretta Thunberg. Get her on board with this. I really feel like she would be into Lord of the Rings like hardcore.
Jeremy: She would go to the cons. I wonder how she is gonna be in like five years. Is she just gonna burn herself out or is she okay? Is she getting therapy or something? I’m very, I’m a fan of Gretta hugely. I just, you know, I want to make sure she’s taking care of herself.
Mike: Right? I think it would burn me out. You’re absolutely right. I hope that she is getting what her help she needs. But I think she’s doing good work. Every time I see some politician or TV pundit or person criticizing her calling her names I’m like you’re attacking a child who’s just trying to help.
Jeremy: Who’s just being like, maybe we shouldn’t be setting our atmosphere on fire. What she is demanding is so sensible: bare minimum, let’s not destroy ourselves. And then just seeing white men just dunking on her on television is so insane to me.
Mike: Oh did you hear what she said when she was testifying somewhere and they said like, why should we stop polluting when China does it worse than us?
Jeremy: Oh my god, I hate that so much.
Mike: But also her response is like that’s what people in Sweden say about you: “Why should we stop polluting? The US just does it worse than us.” We’re not this shining paragon that we think we are.
Jeremy: That’s like the stereotype about Americans: they don’t explore other cultures, they don’t travel. Well, yeah, that would pop our little bubble where we think that everyone just wants to be us and we’re just like the best of the world. But we’re really just this washed up old… We’re like BoJack Horseman the country, just drunk and self destructive, and we’re like, “Remember when we were on top, right at the end of World War 2? We swooped in there and got to write all these rules about how things would go.”
Mike: Oof. It’s true.
Not to bring this podcast back to Pokemon yet again…
Jeremy: We’ll always come back to Pokemon.
Mike: I don’t think it has to. I don’t know I played the most recent game. I bought it on my Switch and I played it for a few days and then I realized… I’m 32. This isn’t for me anymore. And I deleted it.
Jeremy: Wait, are you — I thought you were older than me! You’re 32?
Mike: Yeah! I am like six months older than you
Jeremy: Fuck. I guess I always just thought you were more mature than me, so…
Mike: Oh I’ve always thought that about you.
Jeremy: Wat. Wait, you said 42, right?
Mike: I’m 700,000 years old .That’s how I know The Silmarillion. I was there.
Jeremy: “Don’t speak ot me of the old magic…” What’s the line?
Mike: “I was there when it was written!”
If I can ever intone like a sentence with such gravitas like that organically in my life — one of my goals in life was someday to be in the position to legitimately say either “seize him,” like, command people to seize somebody, or have somebody say to me “you’ll never get away with this” and my response to be “I already have.”
Jeremy: Hell yeah. I really want a “we’ve got company” moment. “We’ve got company!” You know, from every movie you’ve ever seen.
Mike: Now I think rather than those like villainous lines, I want my amazing line that I get to say be something along the lines of like “don’t cite the old magic to me, witch! I was there when it was written.”
Jeremy: If you say that to me someday, that’ll be a highlight of my life.
Mike: I don’t know that I’m going to have a lot of opportunities to be present when the old magic is inscribed on the fabric of the world.
Jeremy: I mean, we could do that. Like we’re talking about doing a cult. We can inscribe some old magic.
Mike: That’s true.
Jeremy: It could be part of the LARP. I mean you can just patchwork together some… Like, it doesn’t have to be straight up copyright infringement on the Tolkien estate, although it’d be really good for our visibility to be sued by the Tolkien estate. But you could copyright infringe Game of Thrones, Tolkien, Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe shit. Get all of them. Just troll the whole sword and sorcery genre and see who nibbles. See if you get any authors or publishers to send us a cease and desist.
Mike: We could pull a final fantasy and just sort of pick and choose from a real world mythologies and pantheons and just sort of repurpose them
Jeremy: Are you familiar with the whole Tommy Westphall, every TV show takes place inside of the snowglobe kind of thing? Have you heard about this?
Mike: Yeah.
Jeremy: I wanna somehow work that. What’s it called in Catholicism where you bestow sainthood upon a figure? Canonisation? We should be able to canonize people, celebrities, fictional characters, and just work them in somehow. Something is really juicy for me about the Tommy Westphall hypothesis because it’s such an absurd idea, but it seems so ripe for exploration in this postmodern blend of reality and fantasy.
I should probably say , in the drama series St. Elsewhere, the last episode, the camera pulls out and the hospital, St. Elsewhere, where the whole show took place, is inside of a snow globe that a kid is looking at. And it’s strongly implied that St. Elsewhere, the series, is the imagination of this kid.
But St. Elsewhere had a lot of crossovers with other TV shows. The hypothesis is that those shows also have to be taking place inside the snow globe. But then when you see what shows had crossovers with those shows or what shows reference other shows, it comes to encapsulate… something like 80% of television is somehow within the Tommy Westphall universe. But there’s also like real life characters that show up in St. Elsewhere or one of its linked properties. So does real life take place inside the mind of Tommy Westphall?
No, that’s bad philosophy, but also, yes, because that’s excellent and I love it.
Mike: It reminds me of the obligatory episode in any kind of genre TV show where some central character wakes up to find themselves in an insane asylum or living as a soccer mom in Michigan, and somebody’s like “No! I’m the commander of a starship!” And like “Debra, please, we’ve been over this a million times, you’re not the commander of a starship.” Or like “Buffy, no, there’s no such thing as vampires! You made this all up!”
Jeremy: Deep Space Nine had an episode that was like that too, as I recall. It was just like, “this is my science fiction idea.” And they’re like “how dumb.”
Mike: Yeah both Stargate TV shows that lasted any significant amount of time did the same thing. The one that I actually liked the did it was The Magicians, where the character who finds himself that situation immediately realizes that it’s a spell at work. He’s like no, this is stupid. I’m going to get out of this.
Jeremy: This is kind of a deep cut but did you ever watch Boy Meets World?
Mike: A few episodes here and there. It was one of those shows that my dad didn’t want us watching because it had boys and girls in charged situation.
Jeremy: There was a witch episode with… DJ from Full House was like a real witch. But she was evil, of course, ’cause like every which except for Sabrina is evil on television.
Mike: I think Sabrina is evil now on the Netflix one because she signed her name in the Devil’s book.
Jeremy: Hmm. That’s dumb.
Mike: Anyway.
Jeremy: I just… The whole ” let’s do a dark reimagining of Sabrina” was a real opportunity to not be dumb about pagan and occult religions. Which, after real witch hunts where people died and the whole “satanic panic” thing where people were sent to prison based on definitely made up shit, it just seems in poor taste to just keep plugging away at that narrative. But whatever.
Uh, well, there was an episode of Boy Meets World.. It was one of the weird later episodes where someone goes to a Hollywood set where they’re doing a Boy Meets World, the TV show, within Boy Meets World, the TV show, and it’s like the same actors playing themselves as actors playing these characters. It was so fucking meta it broke my brain when I was like nine when I saw it. Just like, “what the fuck is happening?”
Mike: I know there was an episode of Supernatural, I think the main two demon hunting brothers got swapped in dimensions with the actors who play them.
Jeremy: Was that before or after they met the Scooby Doo gang?
Mike: Did they meet Scooby Doo people?
Jeremy: Oh, there was definitely a Scooby Doo episode of Supernatural.
Mike: I hate that.
Jeremy: [laughs]
Closing
Thanks to, Mike Jones, our guest. Thank YOU for listening.
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Intro music by Martin H Emes and “Rah” by Uncle Milk (CC BY 4.0). Closing track is “Soft Rain” by Glass Boy (CC BY-ND 3.0).
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Until next time, hail Eru Ilúvatar. Take care of yourself, Take care of each other. Take care of the bumblebees. Build some awesome labyrinths.
See you next time.