Subtext: Conversations About Classic Books and Films

Wes & Erin discuss “Leda and the Swan.”

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” and whether creativity can help us transcend mortality, and how artists should conceive of their relationships to nature and posterity.

Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” begins and ends with the concept of reproduction. In the first stanza, this reproduction is natural and sexual, and in the final stanza is entirely a matter of artifice. The living songbird is transformed into both product and producer, with a form of singing that is gilded by a consciousness of its departure from nature. Where natural reproduction replenishes entities that are neverthless always in the process of dying, art—the speaker seems to hope—is potentially eternal. And yet the poem’s final stanza also reminds us that art is ultimately for the living, and only as alive as its audience. Wes & Erin discuss Yeats’s meditation on whether creativity can help us transcend mortality, and how artists should conceive of their relationships to nature and posterity.

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Roman Polanski’s 1968 classic, and why it is that Satanic evil, when confronted with life’s very frightening realities—including pregnancy itself—turns out to be so banal.

On the surface, “Rosemary’s Baby” is a horror film about a woman who gets taken advantage of by a satanic cult and impregnated by the Devil. In the end, it seems to be a satire on the competing entrapments of domesticity and ambition, and the boring conventionality of people who hope that opposition to convention will allow them to retrieve their lost youth. Wes & Erin discuss Roman Polanski’s 1968 classic, and why it is that Satanic evil, when confronted with life’s very frightening realities—including pregnancy itself—turns out to be so banal.

Erin & Wes continue their discussion of four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine.

Erin & Wes continue their discussion of four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine.

Erin & Wes continue their discussion of four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine.

If only because of its seeming incongruity with a brain “wider than the sky,” the central fact of Emily Dickinson’s life has become her seclusion. As she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1869, “I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town.” Like the relatively modest dimensions of her poems, this self-imposed constraint—of the property line within Amherst, Massachusetts, then the Dickinson home itself, then her bedroom—proved no barrier to a cosmic poetic imagination which “went out upon circumference,” and to which no subject, tone, or emotion was foreign. Erin & Wes discuss four of Dickinson’s best-loved poems, whose little rooms contain some of the definitive poetic statements on grief, pain, violence, death, reason, identity, and encounters with the divine: numbers 340, 372, 320, and 477.

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1940 Best Picture winner “Rebecca,” starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier.

Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film—part love story, part ghost story, part courtroom melodrama—centers on a poor, timid young woman who falls in love with wealthy aristocrat Maxim de Winter, a widower tortured over the death of his first wife. When the young woman becomes the second Mrs. De Winter and moves into Maxim’s estate, she finds her predecessor’s initials stamped all over the house, and its staff in thrall to her beautiful, vibrant memory. But at the heart of the first Mrs. De Winter’s legacy lies a rot, and just what that rot represents in the film—be it the oppressions of vitality and ambition, the wages of class mobility, the unruly desires of sexuality, or the latent evidence of civilizational decline—is our subject today. Wes & Erin discuss the 1940 Best Picture winner “Rebecca,” starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier.

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “You Who Never Arrived” and “Be Ahead of All Parting” (II.13 from his “Sonnets to Orpheus”), and whether—as Rilke suggests—death can be put in service of life, and suffering sourced as the principal wellspring of a joyful existence.

In his poem “You Who Never Arrived,” Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that we can mourn love as an unrealized possibility, and see this loss signified everywhere in the ordinary objects of the external world. In “Be Ahead of All Parting” (II.13 from his “Sonnets to Orpheus”), he seems to claim that poetry has the capacity to redeem such losses—and retrieve them, so to speak, from their underworld. Wes & Erin discuss these two classics, and whether—as Rilke suggests—death can be put in service of life, and suffering sourced as the principal wellspring of a joyful existence.

Wes & Erin continue their discussion the 1970 classic “M.A.S.H,” and whether irony ought always to be our anesthetic, when confronted with traumas that are otherwise unspeakable.

It begins with the “stupidest song ever written,” as Robert Altman called it, and ends with a self-referential jab at the very idea of finding comic relief in the tragedy of war. But it is equally unserious, the film “M.A.S.H” seem to suggest, to take seriously the authority of war-making institutions, and their pretense to putting violence in service of an ideal. And so morality succumbs to mockery, love to hedonism, and military rank to the form of authority immanent in the power to save lives. Yet suicide is not in fact painless, if it means robbing others of our presence, or ridding ourselves of the capacities for grief and earnestness. Wes & Erin discuss the 1970 classic “M.A.S.H,” and whether irony ought always to be our anesthetic, when confronted with traumas that are otherwise unspeakable.

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Marianne Moore’s poem, “The Jerboa,” first published in 1932, and whether power and wealth might paradoxically prove less abundant than the strictures of form and necessity.

Of all the great American Modernists, the poetry of Marianne Moore is perhaps the most idiosyncratic, even the most radical, of them all—no small feat in a group of friends and admirers that included Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, and HD. Moore’s preferred form was a syllabic stanza bespoke to each poetic occasion, like the unique shell of each individual snail or paper nautilus, and often containing rhyme. In these stanzas, Moore hid behind her virtuosic performance of deflection and difficulty and, of course, revealed herself in it, much as one of her pet-subjects, the exotic animal-portrait, contained a self-portrait at its heart. In her poem on the jerboa, Moore contrasts the desert mouse’s decorousness with the decadence of empire, and in so doing, distinguishes her ideal of true artistry—a vigorous, humble, and ultimately liberated response to one’s natural and formal limitations—with a false art which oppresses the natural in service of the powerful. Wes & Erin discuss Marianne Moore’s poem, “The Jerboa,” first published in 1932, and whether power and wealth might paradoxically prove less abundant than the strictures of form and necessity.

What can the contrast between silent and talking pictures teach us about the nature of film itself? And how might it reflect the age-old rivalries between word and image, movement and stasis, the living and the dead? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Billy Wilder’s 1950 masterpiece, “Sunset Boulevard.”

When the film starts, its two leads are already dead, more or less. Silent Screen legend Norma Desmond’s career is dead, and because she’s nothing more than her career, the best she can do is linger in the tomb of her former glory, hoping for a resurrection. And failed screenwriter Joe Gillis quite literally enters the film as a corpse, so, as the film’s narrator, he has no choice but to tell his story in flashback. Thus, it’s safe to say that both Norma and Joe are, well, fatally disadvantaged in the realization of their respective dreams. And yet, both achieve a kind of post-mortem success—Norma as the star of one last film, and Joe as the writer of one last, great, highly-personal tale. (In an expression of what might be the screenwriter’s secret fantasy, he even gets to star in it, to boot.) How is such life after death possible? Arguably only through the magic of celluloid, a medium ghoulishly capable of preserving humans precisely as they are—which all too soon becomes as they were. What can the contrast between silent and talking pictures teach us about the nature of film itself? And how might it reflect the age-old rivalries between word and image, movement and stasis, the living and the dead? Wes & Erin discuss Billy Wilder’s 1950 masterpiece, “Sunset Boulevard.”

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin,” and whether humanity’s religious impulses can be fully compensated with an aesthetic or ironic relation to nature and cosmic scale. Thanks to our sponsor GiveWell, an organization that would provide rigorous, transparent research about the best opportunities for charitable giving. If you’ve never used GiveWell to donate, you can have your donation matched up to $100 before the end of the year, or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org, pick “Podcast,” and enter “SUBTEXT Literature and Film Podcast” at checkout.