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Trump, from Minneapolis to Caracas—Plus, How Capitalism Came to Communist China | Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: From the nation magazine, this is start making sense.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: On John Weiner, later in the show, 20 minutes without Trump.
• 0:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a new TV series about how capitalism came to communist China by the great Hong Kong director, Wong Kar-Wai.
• 0:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: John Powers will comment.
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: But first, from Minneapolis to Taracas, Harold Meyerson has our political update in a minute.
• 0:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Harold Meyerson is editor at large of the American Prospect.
• 0:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Harold, welcome back.
• 0:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Always good to be here, John.
• 0:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've said for a long time that is Trump's support collapsed as his approval ratings crashed as voters overwhelmingly rejected his candidates.
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've always said as he sinks, he would become more dangerous.
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's what's happened in the last week on two fronts in Venezuela and in Minneapolis.
• 1:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: On January 5th, this is five years after his attempted insurrection, he sent
• 1:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: 2,000 federal agents to Minneapolis, the largest federal enforcement operation ever launched.
• 1:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the next morning, an ice agent named Jonathan Ross shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good, as she was trying to drive away from him.
• 1:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The regime then labelled her a domestic terrorist.
• 1:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: But this past weekend, we also had marches and vigils and mass actions to call for action.
• 1:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stop ice.
• 1:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: For good, people organized nearly 1,200 events across the country, and the organization was virtually spontaneous within 48 hours.
• 1:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: So as Trump becomes more dangerous, the opposition to him grows in size and gains in strength and commitment, it's terrible to see the damage he's doing, but it's stirring to see the courage and solidarity of the resistance Tuesday, this week there were demonstrations in Washington, DC, what kind of demands should we be making now of the Democrats in Congress?
• 2:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: First of all, the Democrats in Congress had better win than November elections because then they will have some power.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: What actually interests me is some Democrats in state legislatures reaction to this in Maryland, for instance, a Democratic legislature, legislator has introduced a bill that would ban every
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: anyone who's been working for ice or the border patrol that that would be viewed as a disqualification for doing police work within the state.
• 3:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't see any reason why the 18 states that have trifected democratic control can't enact such laws.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: What we're seeing with what Trump is doing with ICE and the border patrol, and I cite the border patrol because most of its employees have been stationed away from the borders and are really the most violent enforcers including Jonathan Ross.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: of Trump's war on immigrants and anyone he doesn't like.
• 3:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: We really need to curtail those agencies.
• 3:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: At the federal level, that's going to be accomplished only by the Democrats turning out at the polls and recapturing the federal government in one way to keep that going is indeed the kind of rallies that you just cited, John.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: they can enact laws such as the ones I cited for bidding wearing masks and so on.
• 4:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The group indivisible, which coordinated many of these demonstrations the past weekend, suggest that the demand should focus on becoming
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: budget battle.
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're going to have another budget fight.
• 4:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's another deadline at the end of this month.
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And some are demanding defund ice as a requirement of Democrats as they go into the budget fight.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Others know funding for the Department of Homeland Security unless they rain in ice.
• 4:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this could lead presumably to another government shutdown, maybe, that the congressional leadership of the Democrats is very reluctant to do, what do you think about focusing on the budget battle?
• 4:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I think the Democrats have to focus on the budget battle.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: They don't have the votes, I think, to stop the budget from passing the house.
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: They do, however, have the votes because it will take 60 votes to stop the budget from passing in the Senate.
• 5:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if there are 40 Democrats, which is what it would take.
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: to completely defund ICE, I would imagine there might be 40 democratic senators who would hold up the department of Homeland Security budget based on the kind of conditions you just stipulated John.
• 5:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's the story as it stands today from Minneapolis and the response to what's happened in Minneapolis.
• 5:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The second front where Trump has been trying to make himself feel strong as he becomes politically weaker has been, of course, of Venezuela.
• 5:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: When Trump returned to the White House in January, he had two ideas that he'd campaigned
• 5:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: tariffs and drill baby drill tariffs have been a flop.
• 6:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to look more at the energy prices, which he says are going to be helped by invading Venezuela.
• 6:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: During the 2024 campaign, he promised to cut energy prices in half in his inaugural address in 2025.
• 6:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: He declared a national energy emergency, which required repealing environmental regulations.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: He promised that would make us, quote, a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help us do it.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: This past Friday Trump met with the top executives of the oil companies to discuss his plans for Venezuela.
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meeting was basically a debacle, none of the oil executives were willing to commit to going back to Venezuela in investing there.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you watch the video of this Trump spent a substantial part of his meeting with the energy executives talking about his ballroom project and actually getting up and looking out the window and of those executives only the CEO of Exxon Mobile, a gentleman named Darren
• 7:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: uninvestable under current conditions.
• 7:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Remind that's why the oil companies are so reluctant to go along with Trump on this.
• 7:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, when an oil company commits to drilling, this is a huge commitment of capital that's long term and requires a general sense that they will be permitted to do so by whoever the government is and that they'll be secure from, you know, those who might seek to disrupt it.
• 7:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: None of these conditions pertain in Venezuela to put it mildly.
• 7:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: You have the military establishment that's completely against what Trump did in seizing Maduro.
• 8:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: You have all kinds of factions.
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: You have an infrastructure which is decayed over the years as oil companies have largely pulled out of Venezuela.
• 8:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: they seek a level of stability, which is rational for a company that is being asked to invest a little great deal of capital, and absent that stability, you know, they can't really justify to Wall Street among others why they would spend capital doing that.
• 8:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Paul Krugman noticed that the day after Trump's meeting with oil executives, the American embassy in Caracas issued an alert, do not travel to Venezuela, Americans in Venezuela should depart immediately.
• 8:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The alert said there are groups of armed militias setting up roadblocks and searching vehicles for evidence of U.S. citizenship, the risk to Americans include, according to the embassy in Caracas, quote, wrongful detention, torture in detention, terrorism, kidnapping, and poor health
• 9:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: probably not.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there's one other factor which became evident when the the day after Trump met with the oil executives when the Bureau of Land Management auctioned off more than 20,000 acres of public land in Colorado for oil and gas drilling, the kind of thing that Trump does that the environmentalists have makes the environmentalist sick, let us say.
• 9:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there were no bids.
• 9:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: zero bids on the oil and gasoline auction, despite the fact that the land was offered at very low prices, what does that tell us?
• 9:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, among other things, oil companies like there not to be an over-bundance of oil on the market because that brings down their prices.
• 10:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, their interests are not necessarily those of, well, among others, American consumers, of a government that might want to, you know, for a variety of reasons lower prices.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: I should also add, though.
• 10:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: that in his war against wind and solar power, Trump is also, you know, restricting energy, you know, at a time when electric bills are soaring and much of the country, he's sort of guaranteeing that they will continue to soar.
• 10:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Drill baby drill is only half of their
• 10:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: is and stop all other forms of energy production even if they might lower health lower prices.
• 10:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: So this is a bit of a house divided against itself, which is one of the kindest things I guess you can say about the Trump presidency.
• 10:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the federal court this week ruled against Trump's order to block the multi-billion dollar wind project development off Rhode Island and judge ordered that to proceed.
• 11:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Trump is being frustrated defeated and weakened on the wind power front as well.
• 11:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, but that will be appealed by the Trump administration inept though its lawyers may be.
• 11:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, the oil executives who met with Trump didn't completely refuse to have anything to do with the Venezuelan oil, apparently they said they would like to be repaid by the money that Trump says he's going to make from Venezuela and oil for their losses when Venezuela
• 11:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chronicle Phillips, for example, claims it is owed about $12 billion, and suggested they should get that from the oil income that Trump is now claiming to make available.
• 11:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Trump did tell them, quote, we're not going to look at what people lost in the past because that was their fault, close quote from logic at its best, you're going to make a lot
• 12:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then he signed an executive order on last Friday, just to make it clear, declaring yet another national emergency, apparently it's his championship emergency.
• 12:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: This one says any use of the revenue from the sale of Venezuela and oil to repay the billions of dollars owed to oil companies will materially harm the national security and foreign policy of the United States.
• 12:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: What do you think about that?
• 12:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: It just emphasizes the elevation of his personal manias over what, among others, in this case, what business logic, which presumably he, you know, was held himself as a model business man.
• 12:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: what business logic would dictate.
• 12:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, this is a personalist regime.
• 13:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: For precedent, we need to look to the bourbon kings of France as much as any other more post-monarchial government as a model for what Trump is doing.
• 13:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, oil is kind of a special case for Trump here, not just because of the drill baby drill a promise, but don't I recall that during the 2024 campaign, he invited the oil executives to a fundraiser at Mara Logo, and what was that he asked?
• 13:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I think what he did was he invited the oil executives in and he asked them, you know, just for $1 billion in campaign contributions in return for which he promised that, you know, his administration would treat them royally.
• 13:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think that's an advert we can attach safely to Trump.
• 13:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And do we know what the amount of funding for Trump's election campaign ended up being from the oil industry?
• 14:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think it was about half a billion dollars, John.
• 14:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: In Trump's mind, they probably still owe them another half billion dollars.
• 14:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And one way or another, he's determined to get it.
• 14:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: One last thing, today's news quiz, Harold, are you ready?
• 14:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm ready.
• 14:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Who is the acting president of Venezuela?
• 14:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, according to something that Trump posted on truth social, which was a fake Wikipedia page, he himself, Donald Trump, Donald J. Trump, is the acting president of Venezuela.
• 14:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: I would be happy to swap him for a modest, you know, a modest repayment from Venezuela if he promised not to come back, but according to what he wrote, he is the acting president.
• 15:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Harold Myers and winner of today's news quiz.
• 15:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can read them at Prospect.org.
• 15:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Harold, thanks for talking with us today.
• 15:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Always good to be here, John.
• 15:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now, 20 minutes without Trump.
• 15:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a gorgeous new series, streaming now, about the early days of China's capitalist turn in the 90s by the Great Hong Kong Director, Wang Kar-Wai.
• 15:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's called Blossom's Shanghai, and it's on the criterion channel.
• 15:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: For comment we turn to John Powers, he's critic it large on fresh air with Terry Gross, where as I've often said, he has an audience of millions.
• 15:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's also the author of the definitive book WKW with the cinema of Wong Karwai, co-written by Wong Karwai himself.
• 16:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: John Powers first we should remind people about Wong Karwai.
• 16:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: His film in the mood for love is one of my all-time favorites,
• 16:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, no, it's a much beloved film by audiences, but also by critics, in various rankings of the greatest films of all time, it is ranked 24th, I believe, which wouldn't seem so impressive, except in some cases, that makes it in the top 25, the only film in this century in the top 25, because film critics can be past loving.
• 16:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: In other polls, it's the second greatest Asian film behind Ozu's Tokyo story.
• 16:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: You say in your introduction for Craterian, his DNA can be found in everything from award-winning movies like Lost in Translation, to the TV show Mad Men.
• 16:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now I can see his mark in the the Langerous parts of Lost in Translation, but what did Mad Men take from him?
• 17:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I was once interviewing Matthew Weiner and he was saying that the first appearance
• 17:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: in the mood for love is copied in the first appearance of Don Draper in the first episode of Madman you know that he is a huge Wonka wide-mire and it miars many things for instance the way Wonka y uses clothing.
• 17:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: as a way of showing both status but also aspiration, and he said he learned from that to put it in madmen.
• 17:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is one of those cases where the person literally says, as did Sophia Coppola, oh, I copied this guy.
• 17:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, I feel confident in making that attribution.
• 17:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: that explains some of the what shall we call them obstacles we have to fully grasping what's going on in some episodes.
• 18:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's about the early 90s.
• 18:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is after Mao died and Deng Xiaoping turned the country down the capitalist road proclaiming to get
• 18:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rich is glorious.
• 18:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Shanghai Stock Market opened in 1990.
• 18:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's the start of this series.
• 18:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the film is very much kind of in the spirit of Deng Xiaoping.
• 18:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's about the excitement of getting rich about going to fancy restaurants, being with beautiful women, wearing beautiful clothes.
• 18:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: But this shows also very specifically about Shanghai.
• 18:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I understand including the language.
• 18:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, it is, yes, no.
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, my wonker-wide was a boy when his parents moved him to Hong Kong from Shanghai, then he lived in the Shanghai News community of Hong Kong.
• 18:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the thing you need to know is that Shanghai News is a dialect of Chinese that is so, I guess, now so unfamiliar to most people, that when the show played in China, it was subtitled.
• 18:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hundreds of millions of people couldn't follow the language.
• 18:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, the central figure in this story is Mr. Bao, who learns to become a big-time player on the Shanghai Stock Market.
• 19:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: How does one-car-wise Mr. Bao compare to Oliver Stone's Gordon Gecko?
• 19:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, he's a nicer guy than Gordon Gecko.
• 19:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a certain innocence in the Chinese beginning of the stock market where everybody's excited and it seems fun and fresh.
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: As the series progresses, you realize that there are darker figures emerging.
• 19:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know that what seems exciting and fun, oh you can actually make money, oh we can now we can now find people who can make t-shirts that are as good as the French ones, we don't have to import things, we can actually sell things to America, as all that's happening, that's happy at first, but over time the kind of some of the ruthlessness of capitalism comes into play, and so the Gordon Gecko figure does emerge in the show, but it's not the hero.
• 19:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: All the recent American films in TV series about capitalist, like, I don't know, succession or Wall Street, have the same, very strong moral lesson, riches do not bring happiness.
• 20:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rich people are miserable, I'm so glad I'm not rich.
• 20:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't seem to be the Chinese attitude expressed at least in the early parts of this series.
• 20:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, no, I would say that there's not a lot of misery in the series of the kind that Americans have.
• 20:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Our series really do seem to suggest that it just is completely ruinous, whereas, in fact, in China, especially coming out of time where everybody's wearing the same clothing that there are no cars anywhere.
• 20:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can go a long time with people enjoying capitalists.
• 20:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a restaurant row where people eat all the time.
• 20:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the question is, what is the hottest restaurant?
• 20:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what does it mean to be in a particular restaurant?
• 20:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's fun until you realize, yes, but if you're not the hot restaurant, maybe you're destroyed.
• 20:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because in fact, capitalism is a system of winners and losers.
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you actually see the losers.
• 21:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just that it's not in quite the same breast-beating way that Oliver Stone would give us.
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, the first thing that strikes me about Wankarwise, Mr.
• 21:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bow, is how impossibly gorgeous he is in those suits.
• 21:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And how gorgeous the whole thing is, is so many of the shots here are just ravishing.
• 21:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And of course, nobody does this like Wankarwise.
• 21:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nobody does romantic glamorous visual style better than he does.
• 21:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's always from the beginning, always had incredibly beautiful actors and actresses working with him and the actors are as beautiful as the actresses.
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the first episode, you realized the construction of Mr. Bao partly involves him learning to wear those suits.
• 21:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the opening episode is how you learn to be this high-flying capitalist and that involves knowing the kind of suits to wear the kind of place to stay the way to seem because seeming is so much an inspiring confidence.
• 21:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, Mr. Bau has a mentor in all of this.
• 22:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: When he starts out, he doesn't really know anything, especially about the stock market.
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody there does, except the wise old man, Uncle Yee, we would all like an Uncle Yee to tell us what to do.
• 22:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uncle Yee was in fact part of the stock market or the finance world in China before the revolution.
• 22:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's so old that he actually knew all this stuff and then when the communist came probably he'd run a foul of them with some of his wheeling and dealing so that in fact he's a brilliant guy but a slightly tainted figure in certain people's eyes because he was doing stuff that suddenly went from being probably acceptable to being completely unacceptable.
• 22:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: big part of the series is about how Mr. Bao gets rich and there are lessons there about how to understand the new world of the stock market.
• 22:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Chinese audience is told various kind of rules and maxims that seem wise and necessary.
• 23:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: People in tone things like the market is ruthless.
• 23:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a case of survival of the fittest.
• 23:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And my favorite, the market is always right.
• 23:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is said as a line of dialogue perfectly straight.
• 23:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I guess you could hear the same thing today.
• 23:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, Fox business or CNN.
• 23:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, okay, you hear it all the time.
• 23:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: What's weird is when you hear it coming out of their mouths, you don't want to believe that.
• 23:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: You kind of want to warn them.
• 23:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, really, don't think the market is always right.
• 23:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, we live in a country that believes it much more than they do.
• 23:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we even had the experience to know it isn't.
• 23:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the series isn't just about getting rich.
• 23:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's romance too.
• 23:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: You described one car-wise a swooningly romantic filmmaker.
• 23:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's certainly true here.
• 23:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are three women in Mr.
• 23:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bow's life.
• 23:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's a lot of the story that we get involved with.
• 23:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: All beautiful, very different.
• 23:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each one fascinating.
• 24:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about them starting with, I guess, the practical one.
• 24:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, the practic one is Linger, and she's, and she's, I would just say in passing, she's the best actress of the, of the three of them.
• 24:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: She runs a small restaurant that is owned by or co-owned with Mr. Bau.
• 24:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she, she is very business like in practical, but we know that she loves him.
• 24:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, her way of showing the love is to scold him.
• 24:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's very bossy, and she, like the other two, and the second woman is Miss Wang, who works for basically a government office that controls import export things, and she's more or less Mr. Bows handler in his foreign transactions, and everything has to go through her, and then she has a foreboding boss, so she has to answer to.
• 24:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's more girly, she wasn't when the show played in China the one people liked the most.
• 24:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's because she's the sweetest and most innocent.
• 24:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: The third is the sexy one, named Lily, who's a woman with the past who owns the hottest restaurant on Wanky Road, the road where you have to go to eat and where you're measured by how well you're doing on that road.
• 25:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she comes with a dark past.
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: She has a darker beauty.
• 25:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: She dresses more glamorous, late.
• 25:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: You keep waiting for them to get together because somehow she just seems hotter than the other two.
• 25:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And because Wunker always makes romantic stories, it's easy to think that it's just about that.
• 25:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yet what is interesting if you get past the first 12 episodes that are now going.
• 25:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: over the course of the series, each of the three women have a completely different arc than you would expect, even in episode 12, by the end, each of them are more fully developed characters not defined by Mr. Bao, but defined by their own action and each goes in a different direction.
• 25:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And do any of the three have elements of traditional Western romantic movies?
• 25:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that Lily, the restaurant owner, is clearly the noir-ish heroine.
• 26:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Link, she is sort of the tough cookie.
• 26:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's the tough cookie, yes, normally in the American versions, they would make them less, a little, Betty Davis might be the model.
• 26:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think you know, maybe a little less pretty.
• 26:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then the American version was always the one they were always saying well, she's not the pretty one and then Miss one would would be in a mid-Rion You know the the one who's sweet and smiley and everyone likes and who always treats people well and she too is in love with Mr. Bowel But it's problematic because she there is a conflict of interest
• 26:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: in any way active during love, if you work for the Chinese government and you're overseeing Mr. Baal.
• 26:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, there's a certain things you can and can't do, so these are the romantic complications in the show.
• 26:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Mr. Baal, of course, has a rival, a nemesis, an enemy in the stock market.
• 26:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I mean, it is someone who's an enemy for many reasons.
• 26:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't really emerge until the last 10 episodes.
• 27:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: But in fact, he then becomes the driving figure, because there's a way in which Mr. Bao, you're getting the arc of his big rise, and then the question is, you know given the history of narrative, that if you've risen this high, you're going to have to fall to some extent.
• 27:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the agents of his fall will be Mr. Chang's attempts
• 27:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: In reading about it, some people are saying it's so much about the stock market, but almost all of the best parts of the show have to do with friendships, romantic and tangalments.
• 27:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: People trying to make sense of their lives, people losing money and what happens to them.
• 27:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: The glamour part is partly the hook for the show.
• 27:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the fact that there are just fights between close friends that are unlike anything has ever been in a long car, where there is intimate and brutal and painful, there's just a huge cast of characters, a lot of them are really good.
• 28:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, one of my favorite characters is the guy who runs the kiosk on the main the main drag.
• 28:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's very eloquent and perceptive.
• 28:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love that when he described Miss Wong as ever scrappy, ever daring, the guy who runs the kiosk.
• 28:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
• 28:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, no.
• 28:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: He went to that kiosk straight from Warner Brothers 1930s movies.
• 28:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, like the wise newsy who's talking, you know, and who is kind of a Greek chorus figure, so with something needs to be explained.
• 28:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: He explains both conceptually, here on Huang He Road, your fortune rises and falls depending on how you're doing in these restaurants.
• 28:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: but also then he kind of comments the action along the way.
• 28:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's a great one.
• 28:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a business man named Mr. Fawn, who's in 26 of the episodes, who's a provincial businessman who's come because his company has learned how to make certain kind of t-shirts that are as good as the French ones.
• 28:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, he's looking for business and you gradually, he's ex, and you watch him, it's slightly transformed because when he comes, he's a heck.
• 29:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, anybody who promises him a little bit more his eyes light up and all the rest.
• 29:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's a great character, the all the assistance to the women are all good characters.
• 29:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: The people who eat at the restaurant, the Mr. Bau owns.
• 29:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're kind of a family, and all of them are interesting characters all individualized.
• 29:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And one thing you can't do in movies that are 100 minutes is you can't do a kind of a
• 29:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: 30 episodes American shows don't have 30 episodes if we're lucky you know we're excited that they six year a six episode season has been renewed for a second season what's it like to have 30 episodes it's slightly daunting to actually have 30 episodes because it's being made by somebody who's a filmmaker who's used to telling one story and in fact you're being told one story over 30 episodes.
• 30:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, with a lot of shows, you have the feeling that they give you eight, and then for the second season, they're having to think, what are we doing this?
• 30:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, how do we build on this?
• 30:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've just given you a cliffhanger.
• 30:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, when you're doing 30, you don't have those kind of cliffhangers.
• 30:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: You don't have so many where you have to wait a year and a half.
• 30:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's has to be something the next week.
• 30:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, what that means is you're following it along and things change, but
• 30:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: The arc is one huge arc of the story, and then each of the characters have their arcs within it, but you don't have any of the kind of discontinuities you often do.
• 30:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Or the disappointments of saying, oh, the second season wasn't so good, because it's clear they had an idea what they wanted in the first one, and then it was so popular, they realized they had to have a season two, but they hadn't thought of what to do in season two.
• 30:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Or it's not like certain things that are coming out, you know, it shows that we've seen
• 30:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: where they slow horses kind of continues, but doesn't.
• 31:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not bad.
• 31:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is.
• 31:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you can imagine, the first episode, first season of slow horses being 30 episodes.
• 31:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
• 31:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Which I think would be impossible to do.
• 31:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it would be hard to sustain that tone for 30 episodes.
• 31:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nobody's so it's an interesting thing to see something that's basically in a way conceived like a film or a novel.
• 31:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: but that in fact is a TV series in an era where people don't do that.
• 31:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: American critics have talked about this as an exercise in nostalgia.
• 31:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is that the way you see it?
• 31:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, there is certainly, I think when I played in China, it filled many people with nostalgia.
• 31:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because it was capturing the era
• 31:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: when things were opening up, and it all looked like freedom and joy ahead.
• 31:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, things under she have changed.
• 31:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's a much more buckled down thing.
• 31:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of the wealth that people making has been made, but people are now seeing some of the darker sides of it.
• 32:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: But this is back, especially for young people, saying, oh, this is what it was like.
• 32:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then the people who lived here remember like how happy they were.
• 32:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, maybe it's almost like there's 60s in some sort of weird way, which is,
• 32:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome what is an nostalgic filmmaker.
• 32:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: He missed the Shanghai of his childhood and he's made these movies filled with set in the past and the mood for love is giving you a kind of poeticized, beautiful Hong Kong.
• 32:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: But usually the idea in it isn't nostalgic.
• 32:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's not like, oh, you're wallowing in the past.
• 32:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're seeing, you're seeing, in fact, how the past shifted from, I'd say, the Happy
• 32:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: to the more dramatic darker last 10 episodes with then the middle part where things are in flux, you know, and so it's capturing that era, but I don't think in a way that identifies it except for the way that movies and TV purify everything.
• 32:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I don't think it's preeminent desires to be nostalgia.
• 33:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Blossom Shanghai, 30 episodes by Wong Karwai about the early days of capitalism in Shanghai.
• 33:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Playing now on the Criterion Channel, they dropped three new episodes every week.
• 33:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: John Powers wrote an introduction for the website Criterion.com.
• 33:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: John, thanks for talking with us today.
• 33:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: My pleasure, John.
• 33:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've been listening to Start Making Sense, a podcast from the Nation Magazine.
• 33:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Renee Reynolds is our associate producer.
• 33:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alan Minsky is our producer.
• 33:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jack Merkinson is Executive Producer.
• 33:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Baskar Sunkara is President of the Nation.
• 33:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Katrina Vandenhuvul is editor and publisher of the Nation.
• 33:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our theme music is from Barcelona.
• 33:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Afrobeat, licensed by Creative Commons.
• 33:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can find out more about Start Making Sense at the Nation.com.
• 34:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you can subscribe to start making sense on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
• 34:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm John Weener.
• 34:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening.