Transcript

Cloud Atlas · This Film is Lit

0:04
Speaker A: This Film Is lit, the podcast where we finally settle the score on one simple Is the book really better than the movie? I'm Brian and I have a film degree, so I watch the movie but don't read the book.
0:15
Speaker B: And I'm Katie. I have an English degree, so I do things the right way and read the book before we watch the movie.
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Speaker A: So prepare to be wowed by our expertise and charm as we dissect all of your favorite film adaptations and decide if the silver screen the or the written word did it better. So turn it up, settle in and get ready for spoilers because this film is lit. He who would do battle with the many headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain. And only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops? It's Cloud Atlas. And. And this film is Lit. Hello and welcome back to this Film Is lit, the podcast where we talk about movies that are based on books. Sorry this episode is getting to you a little late. It's a long book and it's a more than that. It's a complicated read. Shall we? Yeah, particularly parts of it took me a while to get through because you really have to like, lock in and focus on what you're reading. Couldn't listen to an audiobook of most of it because it was just too hard to follow, like with the language and stuff, which we'll talk about more when we get into it. So this episode's a little bit late, but I think it'll be a good one because, boy, I got a lot to say about this book and this movie. So we do not have a guess who. This week I started going through and I found a couple characters, but not enough to make it particularly interesting. And the character descriptions aren't like super detailed. Like I found one of Luisa Rae where it's like she has short hair and is wearing a purple dress and that's it. There's not even a color of hair. So it's like literally like, okay, well, that's not gonna do much. So no. Guess who. But we do have the rest of our segments. If you have not read or watched Cloud Atlas, we're gonna give you a brief summary of the film in. Let me sum up. Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. As I mentioned, this is a summary of the film sourced from Wikipedia, and this summary puts all pieces of the story into chronological order and not like it doesn't jump around the way the movie does, but it also explains that here, right at the beginning, the story jumps between eras spanning hundreds of years until each storyline eventually resolves. Writings from characters in prior storylines are found in future storylines. Characters appear to recur in each era but change relationships to each other, suggesting reincarnation or other connection between souls through the ages. So that's like somebody's just priming you for the rest of it. Here in the Chatham Islands, 1849, American lawyer Adam Ewing is waiting for his transport ship to be repaired. He witnesses the whipping of Atua, an enslaved Moriori man. Attua stows away on Ewing's ship, having noticed Ewing's sympathy, and persuades him to advocate for Atua to join the crew as a free man. Attua saves Ewing's life before the ship's Dr. Henry Goose can poison Ewing and steal his gold under the guise of treating him for a parasitic worm. In San Francisco, Ewing and his wife Tilda denounce her father's complicity in slavery and leave for New York to join the abolition movement. In 1936, British composer Robert Frobisher finds work as an Amuensis amanuensis. I thought I looked how to pronounce this but to agent composer Vivian Ayers, allowing Frobisher to compose his own masterpiece, the Cloud Atlas Sextet. As the sextet nears completion, Ayers demands credit for it and threatens to expose Frobisher's bisexuality if he refuses. Frobisher shoots and wounds Ayers and goes into hiding. Frobisher finishes the sextet and shoots himself before his lover, Rufus Sixsmith, arrives in San Francisco. 1973, journalist Louisa Ray meets Sixmith, now a nuclear physicist. Sixmith tips off Ray to a conspiracy to create a catastrophe at a nuclear reactor run by Lloyd Hooks, who secretly promotes oil promotes oil energy interests. He is killed by Hooks hitman Bill Smoke before he can give her a report as proof. Scientist Isaac Sachs passes her a copy of the report. But Smoke kills Sax and then runs Ray's car off a bridge, destroying the report. With help from the plant's head of security, Joe Napier, Ray evades another murder attempt and Smoke is killed. With another copy of the report from Sixmith's niece, Ray exposes the plot and has Hooks indicted. In London in 2012, gangster Dermot Higgins Hoggins murders a critic after a harsh review of his memoir, generating huge sales. Hoggins brothers threaten the publisher, the aging Timothy Cavendish, for Hoggins profits. Timothy's brother Denholm tells him to hide at Aurora House. Believing Aurora House is a hotel, he signs in, only to discover that he has unwittingly committed himself to a nursing home where all outside contact is prohibited. Denholm reveals that he sent Timothy there as revenge for an affair with his wife. Timothy escapes with three other residents, resumes his relationship with an old flame, and writes a screenplay about his experience in Korea. 2144 San MI451 is a fabricant, a humanoid clone indentured as a fast food server in a dystopian Neo Seoul. She is exposed to ideas of rebellion by another Fabricant, Yuna 939, who has obtained a clip of the movie about Cavendish's involuntary institutionalization. After Yuna is killed, San Mi is rescued by rebel commander Haeju Chang, who exposes Sun Mi to the bandwritings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the full film version of Cavendish's experiences. Eventually, Heiju shows her that Fabricants are actually recycled into food that keeps them acquiescent. Sun Mi makes a public broadcast of her revelations before the authorities attack, killing Haeju and recapturing Sun Mi. After recounting her story to an archivist, she is executed in 2321. The tribesmen of a post apocalyptic Hawaii worship San Mi, whose recorded testimony is the basis of their sacred text. Zachary Bailey's village is visited by Marinem, a member of an advanced off world society called the Prescience who are dying from a plague. I don't actually know if they're off.
6:14
Speaker B: World to be I felt like when we were watching the movie that they were not.
6:18
Speaker A: Yeah, my reading from the book was that they are from a different part of the world, but I could be wrong about that.
6:24
Speaker B: That was also the vibe that I.
6:26
Speaker A: Got in the movie who are dying from a plague. Marinem is searching for a forgotten communications station on Monosol to end to send an SOS to off world humans in exchange for healing Zachary's niece Katkin. Marinem is guided by Zachary to the station where San Mi made her recording. I actually don't know if that's true either that that's where she made her recording. I think that's they have a she's able to access the recording there, but I don't know if she made her recording anyways. Returning home, Zachary finds his tribe slaughtered by the cannibalistic Kona tribe. He kills the sleeping Kona chief and rescues Catkin before he and Marinem fight off the other Kona tribesmen. Zachary and Catkin join Marinem in the Prescience. As their ship leaves Big island on a distant planet, Zachary is married to Marinem and recounts the story to his grandchildren. The end. So Katie has so many questions. We're gonna jump into them in. Was that in the book?
7:17
Speaker B: Gaston?
7:18
Speaker A: May I have my book, please? How can you read this? There's no pictures.
7:22
Speaker B: Well, some people use their imagination. I don't remember exactly where this was. This was somewhere like right off the top of the movie.
7:31
Speaker A: I think this is when Cavendish is talking. I think.
7:34
Speaker B: Yeah.
7:35
Speaker A: Cause it's during the big. Where we're jumping around to like all the different stories.
7:39
Speaker B: Right. Because at the movie, at the beginning of the movie, it jumps around pretty fast to try to introduce us to all the different settings right off the top. And yeah, one of the characters says, like, there is a method to this tale of madness, which I thought was very meta.
7:58
Speaker A: Yeah.
7:59
Speaker B: And I was wondering if that line was from the book.
8:01
Speaker A: That line is not from the book that I could find. At least not that I was able to find a PDF of this that I could search, but I didn't. So I did not find that specific line. But the book makes a ton of meta references to its unique structure, which we'll discuss more later, so that it's not remotely out of place within that. Commenting on the. Again, a meta commentary on the structure of the story and it being strange, is right at home in the book. And it happens a lot. In fact, there's a moment, I think the line right before this, which we'll get to later, is, I think this is Cavendish, where he says, like, I'm not a fan of flash as an editor, I'm not a fan of flashbacks, flash forwards and other tricksy something or another. But there is a method to this tale of madness, I think is like the full line. And that line is from the book, which I thought was very funny, where Cavendish is like, as an editor, I don't approve of flashbacks and flashforwards. Obviously this book employs kind of some. It's not really. It's different in the. Yeah, but we'll get to it. But no, that line is not in the book. But again, very in line with the book's general tone.
9:06
Speaker B: So my next question is also about a specific line when we start to dive into the story with Adam Ewing.
9:16
Speaker A: Yes.
9:16
Speaker B: Who?
9:17
Speaker A: The 1849.
9:18
Speaker B: Yeah, the 1849 story. When that opens up, he's at dinner with a bunch of people and I.
9:26
Speaker A: Can explain who he is because it's kind of. This is not a scene that's in the book. But he's at dinner with his wife's. Or fiance, I think. His wife. Yeah, his wife's father. His father in law, who we see it again at the end of the movie. And Reverend Horrocks, who is a character in the book, but who doesn't appear until much later. We never see that character before, like, early on in the story. But they're having a conversation and they're discussing racial hierarchies and stuff like that and what God has to say about, like, slavery and that sort of thing.
9:59
Speaker B: Yeah. And they talk about, like, the nature of man in this conversation and what this, like, specific writer or.
10:11
Speaker A: Oh, I think they're talking about Reverend Horrocks. Yeah, what he thinks.
10:14
Speaker B: What he.
10:15
Speaker A: Yeah, he's like a reverend. He's like a religious figure.
10:18
Speaker B: And then the sole woman who's present in this scene, who I assume is his then mother in law.
10:24
Speaker A: I'm not sure now. Yeah, it's either the mother, because I don't think it's Tilda.
10:29
Speaker B: No.
10:29
Speaker A: So I think it's somebody else. Yeah, it must be his mother in law or something like that.
10:34
Speaker B: And she chimes in and says, what does he have to say on the nature of woman?
10:39
Speaker A: Asking, like, what does God have to say of the nature of woman? Yeah.
10:42
Speaker B: And to which they kind of just laugh at it.
10:45
Speaker A: They laugh at how? Like, not much or whatever, because. Yeah.
10:47
Speaker B: So is that line from the book.
10:49
Speaker A: It is not. But again, it is very much in line with the general political bent of this book. It is a very progressive book that is also very tongue in cheek, critical of conservative values. There are a lot of. And not even conservative values necessarily, but just of that sort of thing of, like, patriarchal religious systems and all that kind of stuff. The book has a lot of, like, asides from characters kind of jabbing at traditional hierarchies and patriarchal systems and organized religion and all that kind of stuff. So again, that exact line is not in the book, but it's very much in line with the kind of commentary happening in the book.
11:35
Speaker B: So then staying in that same storyline, they go out and they're on, like a plantation, like a big giant farm that is using slave labor.
11:45
Speaker A: Yeah. I believe this is supposed to be. I don't know exactly what this. So this may be Reverend Horrocks Plantation, because that later in the book, when we get to Reverend Horrocks place, he's like, on an island. And this is why it's a little bit confusing. I don't know where they're supposed to be necessarily right here.
12:02
Speaker B: Yeah.
12:03
Speaker A: Because the father in law, Adam's father in law is there. I'm not sure how he's there. I wasn't sure of what this was all supposed to be because it's combining several scenes into one. In the book where Adam is in this moment is he is in the Chatham Islands getting ready, which is an island off of New Zealand, getting ready to get on a ship to head back to San Francisco. And he sees these slaves. And that must be where they're supposed to be right now, I guess, because that would make sense for who these characters are. The Reverend Horrocks is a guy that is a missionary who set up like, a city and is colonizing an island in the Caribbean later, or Hawaii near Hawaii later that we meet at the end and they just, like, transplanted him to the Chatham Islands, I think is what happens. We just completely cut the scenes where they go and visit his island that he's colonizing and they just move his character to the Chatham Islands for this brief scene, I think so anyway.
13:05
Speaker B: I mean, that sounds like it makes sense.
13:07
Speaker A: It works. Okay. We'll talk more about the stuff they cut with Revan Horrox later. But yeah.
13:12
Speaker B: Okay. So at any rate, in the movie, Adam is out, like, getting a tour of this place, I guess. And one of the things he sees is an enslaved man, like, tied to a pole, being whipped. And he passes out.
13:32
Speaker A: Yeah.
13:32
Speaker B: Upon seeing this. Is any of that from the book?
13:35
Speaker A: So that whole scene is exactly from the book, especially including, like, details down to, like, the. Here they hear that humming sound.
13:41
Speaker B: Yeah.
13:42
Speaker A: And then he's like, what is that? And they go, see, see? And it's this guy being whipped. That is all in the book. He doesn't pass out in the scene. And I think it's fine. What they're doing there is. They're just. That's just a. A shorthand way to introduce Adam's illness that he's suffering from. Like, he passes out. And so this sets down like, oh, he has this illness that he's dealing with. But that exact scene where he sees this guy being whipped and they, like, lock eyes and, like, share a moment is directly from the book. And we'll talk more about it later. But for context, what is going on here is that in the book, that character Atua, who we meet later, is a Moriori, and he's one of the only remaining Moriori. And the book goes into a lot more detail about this, but there's this complicated real history that the book is Trading on here where the Moriori were the people, like the indigenous people that lived on the Chatham Islands, which are. And they have a different name, like an actual indigenous name. I'm using the colonized name. That's what the book primarily uses. There's these little islands right off the coast of New Zealand and there was a group of people on those islands called the Moriori. And they were eventually, ultimately conquered and enslaved by the Maori people from the New Zealand Islands. So the person whipping him in that scene in the book is a Maori slave owner, like chieftain or whatever. But anyways, yes, the scene is basically identical. Adam just doesn't pass out. Okay, I will be less verbose. I'm talking too much here. I'm getting ahead of myself to stuff that comes later. There's just so much in this book and that. And it's hard to talk about piecemeal. So.
15:20
Speaker B: Yeah, and I was like. I was kind of struggling with that when I was coming up with questions as we were watching the movie too, because I didn't. I would. I didn't have a hard time following the movie.
15:31
Speaker A: That's good.
15:32
Speaker B: Like at all.
15:32
Speaker A: I was kind of interested to see somebody who hadn't read the book, how the movie played because it's so different.
15:38
Speaker B: I did like, I had the Wikipedia page open because I was having a hard, like the only time I had a hard time, the only thing I had a hard time with was catching people's names when they were introduced. And then a lot of times they didn't go on to like say their name again. So I had like. I had the Wikipedia page open so I could kind of keep track of who was who. But that was really the only thing that I struggled with.
16:02
Speaker A: It's not particularly complicated, the movie or the book. And the book's not even particularly complicated. There's some like, deep like history and stuff and there's a lot of like political things you have to keep in mind through the different stories. But the stories themselves are very straightforward, kind of relatively self contained, easy to understand stories. And even in the movie where it all gets way more mixed together, it's still fairly straightforward to keep like what's going on in each of the plots. Like, I don't. Yeah. So I was interested to see though. So I'm kind of. I'm glad to hear that for somebody who didn't read the book that it, it still kind of works as its own.
16:40
Speaker B: Yeah, I thought it worked. But my next question is about the 1970s story where Halle Berry is an Intrepid reporter.
16:53
Speaker A: That story is called Half Lives. The first. The first Louisa Ray mystery, I believe is the name of that in the book.
17:00
Speaker B: And one of the first things we see happen with her is that she gets in an elevator with an older gentleman and the elevator like the power goes out and the elevator gets stuck. Does that happen in the book?
17:12
Speaker A: Yeah, that exact same scene occurs. Luisa Ray is leaving an interview with an aging rocker at a hotel and she gets on this elevator with Rufus Sixmith and then they get stuck for several hours because there's a brownout. They're in a city called Buenas Yerba in the book, which is not a real city, it's a real area kind of. But it's basically like a made up city near like around San Francisco, like LA area or. I know those aren't super close to each other, but I think near San Francisco specifically.
17:44
Speaker B: So what is a brownout?
17:47
Speaker A: A brownout is. Was specifically a thing that happened a lot and it's different than a blackout where it's like. I think it's an intentional power cut to alleviate power over like over power consumption to stop a blackout from happening. Like a blackout is like, oh shit, shit went bad, all power got cut out. A brown out is like we're intentionally cutting power to say I think or something like that because there's going. I can't. I don't remember the exact difference between a blackout and a brown out. But there is some. Something specific that a brown out is. That is slightly. And my brain once says it's something like. It's an intentional temporary partial reduction. Electrical power and voltage in your grid often recurring during periods of high. So it's similar. It's less disruptive than a blackout. It's less disruptive than a blackout. And like all the power doesn't cut out, but certain like high energy stuff maybe does. So like an elevator potentially would be one of those things that let like so. So it's like the whole city didn't lose power. It's just like parts of it are like struggling to supply enough power as they need or whatever.
18:55
Speaker B: Okay.
18:55
Speaker A: Which was a big issue from my memory. Like it was an actual issue in the 70s in LA and like on the West Coast. I think it's still an issue to some extent. Like they have power issues during the summer from heat and drought and stuff. So.
19:08
Speaker B: So then we catch up with the 2012 story.
19:12
Speaker A: Yeah. Which is the Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.
19:17
Speaker B: Yes. Who is an editor and he. Or a publisher. Editor. Yeah, whatever.
19:25
Speaker A: He's a. He's an editor who works. But he's also like, the only person who works at this publishing company, basically.
19:31
Speaker B: And he has worked with this guy who is like a mobster and published his autobiography, Dermot Hawkins, and they're. They're having, like, a launch party for it.
19:42
Speaker A: It's not a launch party. No, he is. Well, I don't know what it is in the movie. I don't know if they ever say it, but in the book, they're at an awards dinner. It's like a. It's like a literary awards event or something like that that he has shown up at.
19:55
Speaker B: But this mobster guy, a critic, wrote a really bad review of his book. And at this event, he gets upset and throws the critic off of the roof.
20:07
Speaker A: Yes.
20:08
Speaker B: And he goes splat.
20:10
Speaker A: He goes splat? Yeah.
20:12
Speaker B: Is that from the book?
20:13
Speaker A: It is absolutely. That scene is identical to the scene in the book. One little detail that I liked was that it's very clear in the book that Timothy Cavendish is like a boutique publisher that basically just takes money from people to publish. It's not even a boutique publisher. It's not the right word. Like a. There's a term for this, like, where publishers who. It's like fake. I can't even remember the. I feel like there's a term for this. But anyways, he just takes people's money to publish their book. And he does publish them, but he does. It's not like a legit. It's almost. It's like a step above self publishing. It's like a. It's like a self publishing scam almost, where, like, he basically. They don't distribute the books, like, at all. And he says it's an author partnership setup. And, like, there's a line in the book where he's talking to Dermot and. Or he says. I explained yet again, that my authors derived fulfillment from presenting their handsomely bound volumes to friends, family and to posterity, not from, like, their book selling a bunch of copies. Because he even says that the book is not in any stores. Like, he hasn't actually put it in any stores. Like, it's. So it's kind of a scam. It's like, oh, you have a book. Yeah, I'll publish it. And they publish it. And he prints, like, a thousand copies and doesn't do anything with them, basically.
21:28
Speaker B: Honestly, I think boutique publishing might be the right term for that, maybe.
21:33
Speaker A: I feel like there's a specific term. I'm blanking on, but.
21:36
Speaker B: So then another of our Storylines here is set in, like, the far, far, like, post apocalypse apocalyptic future.
21:46
Speaker A: Yes.
21:46
Speaker B: And there's two set in the future.
21:49
Speaker A: But one of them is. Yeah, one of them is, like 2300.
21:52
Speaker B: Something way in the future. And the part of society in this distant future that we are initially introduced to has basically reverted to, like a hunter gatherer type basically, of society.
22:07
Speaker A: Like a nomadic. Yeah, I don't even know if they're nomadic necessarily, but they're like a. Yeah, the hunter gatherer. They might do a little farming, like, but not yet. They're an agrarian, like, very minimalistic, like, yeah, society.
22:20
Speaker B: And there's another, like, tribe in this area who. The Kona, who are cannibals. Are there cannibals in the far future in the book?
22:33
Speaker A: So I didn't remember them ever being labeled explicitly as cannibals in the book, but they are, like, brutal warriors. And the scene that you're probably talking about here is we see the opening scene of that storyline is Zachary Tom Hanks character watching his brother and nephew get killed by them. And at the end of that, he kills, like, his brother, and then he, like, licks the blood off of the knife. And that specific scene is mentioned in the book is that he, like, kills. In the book, it's his father, which we'll get to later. It's Zachary's father, not his brother. But he does lick the blood off the knife. And it's implied that they're kind of like a warlike cannibal thing. But we don't learn much of anything about the Kona and what their whole deal is. But everything in this book rhymes. It's very. Like, everything is referential to other stories. And so there's references. In the very, very first scene of the book, when Adam first meets Dr. Henry Goose, he's on the beach picking up teeth. And one of the mentions is that there were, like, cannibal teeth. Like, they were teeth that belong to a cannibal tribe or something like that. So it's. Again, there's this little referential stuff like, so these. That element of cannibalism in there also gets referenced kind of with this other future storyline and stuff like that. So.
23:59
Speaker B: Speaking of references to cannibalism, my next question is, back in the 1849 Adam Ewing story, I feel like I have to preface every question with what story I'm in.
24:19
Speaker A: When I was doing better in the book, better in the movie, and the movie nailed it. Notes later. Initially, when I first put those in, they were so out of order. Because the movie is out of order. And I was doing it from my movie notes first, and then I went back, and I think I mostly got it into book order, but, man, it was a mess. Cause the movie moves everything. Well, it doesn't move everything around. It just leaves everything together. So everything's happening simultaneously. And we're cutting constantly from storyline to storyline, which we'll discuss. That's the big thing we'll discuss in Lost adaptation here in a bit.
24:50
Speaker B: Yeah. So in that storyline, Ewing is now on his ship, and he's mostly, like, below decks because he's very ill. Yeah.
25:01
Speaker A: He's also. He's just a passenger. He's not like a crew member.
25:05
Speaker B: Right.
25:05
Speaker A: He's just paying for passing. Yeah.
25:08
Speaker B: And we find out that the enslaved man that he saw earlier has stowed away in his cabin. Atua is how you.
25:19
Speaker A: I don't know exactly how it's pronounced, but yeah. A, U, T, U, A.
25:22
Speaker B: And he ends up, like, revealing himself to him. And they. He wants Adam to basically, like, plead his case to the captain. And I'm trying to remember the exact context for this line.
25:42
Speaker A: I think it's that he brings him some food. It might even be later when he brings him some food, like after that initial interaction, potentially. Or it might be during it or whatever, where he says he's hungry. And Adam says, like, oh, I was worried for a minute you were gonna try to eat me. Yes, is what he says.
25:59
Speaker B: Yeah, he brings him some food. He says, I was worried you might try to eat me. And Attua makes a little joke and says, I know, like white meat.
26:08
Speaker A: Yes.
26:08
Speaker B: Is that from the book?
26:09
Speaker A: That line is not from the book. I will say that whole scene where they're first introduced is a lot of. It's like word for word, when a tua first appears in his compartment. And a tua style of speaking is, like, identical. Like, the phrasing and the. The kind of broken English that he uses is almost identical to what is described in the book. But that specific line is not in it also, because Attua is not particularly in a joking mood in these early parts. He is, like, pleading for his life to this guy. I wasn't a huge fan of that line in that moment. To me, it didn't feel super fitting necessarily, but, I mean, I chuckled, but it's not. Yeah, it's not in the book. And it also just felt like. I also don't know, it felt like maybe a line that was. What's the term for when something is not from the time it Was written.
27:03
Speaker B: Oh, anachronistic.
27:04
Speaker A: Yes. It felt a little anachronistic to me. Like, that's a modern joke in this 1849 setting. And the book is very careful. At least it appears to me that everything said, all the dialogue, everything discussed is very much in the style and tone and everything of, like, 1849. So there are no, like, that kind of joke in it. So again, maybe that joke would have been made in 1849. That just strikes me as a very anachronous.
27:33
Speaker B: Yeah, it does feel like a pretty modern joke. I mean, you never know. Sometimes that stuff is weird and, like, older than you think it is, but it does feel modern. Back with intrepid reporter Louisa Ray. Yes, that's her name, right? Yeah. So she has acquired some old letters from six Smith.
28:01
Speaker A: Yeah. She found them under his body.
28:03
Speaker B: She found them under his body after he was.
28:06
Speaker A: That might be how she.
28:07
Speaker B: After he was offed by the Bill Smoke. Bill Smoke, the assassin. Great assassin name.
28:13
Speaker A: It is a great assassin name.
28:15
Speaker B: I guess when you're an assassin, you have to take an assassin name. She has these letters, and they're letters that he exchanged with his lover frobisher in the 1930s storyline, which we haven't even talked about.
28:34
Speaker A: We haven't talked about yet. But that is one of the other plot lines is. That is called Letters from Zettelhelm in the book.
28:43
Speaker B: Mm. And in those letters, he talks about this piece he's composing, which is the Cloud Atlas Sextet. And she goes to a record store to pick up a copy of it. And then when she. It's playing when she goes in and when she hears it, she recognizes it, which I thought was fun because Halle Berry also plays a character in the 1930s story. So it was kind of like, oh, she's recognizing it from her previous life.
29:17
Speaker A: Yes. Which is funny because if anything, she's actually Robert Frobisher. That's the thing that's kind of confusing about the movie, if we're following the birthmark. Yes, that's the thing that's kind of confusing about the movie is that they do the thing with multiple character, like actors playing different characters. And so you assume. And that's what confused me initially. I was like, oh, the characters that the same actor is playing must be the characters through these stories that have the same soul or whatever. And that is not the case from my understanding at least. Robert Frobisher, who has the birthmark, the comet birthmark, and Louisa Ray, who has the comet birthmark, they are the same soul. Reincarnation or whatever. And so she recognizes it because her past life was Robert Frobisher, not because her past life was Jocasta, the woman who was married to. Yeah, anyways, that's a little weird, but yeah. Your question was, does she recognize.
30:23
Speaker B: Yeah. Does she recognize it when she goes to get the record?
30:25
Speaker A: Yes. Yeah. That scene at the record store is like identical. She comes in, she calls earlier in the book and she asks like, hey, do you have the Cloud Atlas sex? And the guy's like, oh, I don't know. And he like finds or whatever. And it's like, well, there's not many pressings of that. And she's Anyways, so then she comes in to pick it up and when she walks into the store, there's music playing in the store like in the movie. And she's like, what is she literally in the book? She's like, never mind what I came here for. I need this. What is this? This. I've heard this before. I have to own it. And the dude is like, oh, this is Cloud Atlas Sextet. Somebody called and was reserved it or whatever. And I just wanted to listen to it. And she's like, oh, that's what I. So it is the thing that she came there for. Yeah.
31:09
Speaker B: Cool.
31:09
Speaker A: And it's the exact same line where she's like, I know this from. I know this somehow. Yeah.
31:13
Speaker B: Very random question, but there's a quick little flashback in the Timothy Cavendish story where he recounts the night that he attempted to lose his virginity with this girl that he was dating, but her parents came back early. Yeah. And in this story, he's naked when her parents walk in the room. And he grabs the cat to hide his penis.
31:41
Speaker A: Yes. The cat freaks out and he falls out the window.
31:44
Speaker B: Is that from the book?
31:46
Speaker A: No. So that particular story is not from the book. I went back and double checked because I was like. When we were watching the movie, I was like, boy, I don't remember this at all. He does see Ursula's house. Cause that is triggered in the movie. And it's the same thing in the book where he's. He's as. He's traveling to Aurora house from town. He's like, got to get out of town to get away from the. The debtors who are trying to get money from him. He's kind of on the run and he stops at a train station in this town and he's walking through town, I think to get to Aurora House or something like that. And he sees this house and is like, oh, that's where Ursula lived. And he remembers some past like moments of like their relationship, their brief relationship together. But one of those moments that he remembers is not having sex and her parents arriving and him hiding his penis with a cat and falling out of the window. That is not one of the things. They're a lot less interesting than that. It's just like, oh, we went on a date. I think he talks about hooking up in her bedroom when her parents were out of town. But there's no mention of them coming back and interrupting them or anything like that. Another new story we haven't talked about.
32:52
Speaker B: Yeah, we haven't talked about this one yet. The Neo Soul storyline.
32:57
Speaker A: Yeah, this one's in like 2149 or something like that. 2100 something.
33:02
Speaker B: The far future, but not as far as the post apocalyptic.
33:06
Speaker A: Not quite post apocalyptic yet, but right on the precipice of apocalypse.
33:10
Speaker B: Dystopian.
33:10
Speaker A: Yes, dystopian. Not quite apocalyptic yet. Yeah.
33:16
Speaker B: And in this story, some of the characters watch a movie that is about Timothy Cavendish.
33:25
Speaker A: Yes.
33:26
Speaker B: Is that from the book?
33:27
Speaker A: Yes. And we'll get more of this into more of this in the structure section we're gonna talk about Lost in Adaptation. But yes, they watch a Disney, which is.
33:37
Speaker B: They call them Disneys and not movies.
33:40
Speaker A: Yes. In 21, in the Neo Soul storyline. In the book, everything has. Not everything, but lots of stuff has names. This book plays a lot with like the different dialects of different time periods and stuff like that. And it imagines dialects for the future time periods, which we'll talk about at length with the, the Sluicea story. But the. In the Neo Soul one, there's a lot of like slang for stuff. Like movies are Disney's. Oh gosh. Video players are called Sonys. They're all called Sonys. And like computers are like called Sonys. And there's a bunch of stuff like that similar to like Kleenex. Yeah, it's like where brand names for things have become the names of whole.
34:27
Speaker B: Categories of things, which makes sense from what we see of that world, that it's like hyper consumeristic.
34:34
Speaker A: It's a corporacy, corpocracy, which we'll get to later. It's literally a corporation run government or a political system. Yeah. But one of the things that I thought was funny. Yes, they do watch that movie. They do watch the Ghastly Ordeal. Timothy Cavendish and Son Me becomes obsessed with it. It's her favorite movie. But this line in the book that I thought was really interesting is she's talking about watching the ghastly ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. And she's reciting kind of musing on movies as a thing. Time is the speed at which the past decays, but Disney's enable a brief resurrection. She notes that for the first time since her ascendancy, she forgot herself utterly, ineluctably. The book also does a lot of that of, like, kind of musing on art generally and, like, the purpose of art and all that kind of stuff and, like, the ways in which art affects us. And that was just a little aside about movies that as a movie guy, I had to mention, because I was like, that's nice. That's nice.
35:39
Speaker B: So at the point that we are introduced to that film in the Neo Soul segment, we don't yet know in the movie what the ghastly ordeal of Timothy Cavendish is.
35:52
Speaker A: No, we have not. Yeah.
35:53
Speaker B: But we find out shortly after that the ghastly ordeal of Timothy Cavendish is that he basically gets tricked into signing himself into, like, an old folk where they're not allowed to leave or contact anyone.
36:12
Speaker A: It is a weird.
36:12
Speaker B: Yeah, like a jail for the elderly, essentially.
36:16
Speaker A: Yeah.
36:18
Speaker B: Does that come from the book?
36:20
Speaker A: Yes, yes, absolutely. He does. He goes to the Aurora. His brother is like, look, I can help you. I got a place you can lay low. Go to this. Go to this address. Yeah, because of the mobsters. Go to this address and they'll help you out. They'll give you a place to stay. And when he gets there, it's, like, really late and he's been up for, like, multiple days because the travel's a nightmare and stuff like that, which I'll talk a little bit more at other times. But he. When he gets there. So he gets there really late at night and doesn't really look at what he's signing or anything and just, like, signs in and, like, goes to bed and thinking it's a hotel. And then. Yes, that all plays out identically a slight better in the movie here that I liked is that we get a scene of later in the movie where Timothy calls back home and Denholm answers and explains, like, why he did this, like, what's going on? And he basically explains that it was because he had an affair with Georgette years ago. That all is alluded to in the book, but it's never, like, explicitly stated, like, why Denholm did this, because when he. In the book, that scene happens where he calls back to their house, but when he calls, Georgette answers it and she seemingly kind of lost her mind. And she. She says that Denny is dead and drowned in the pond in the backyard. And he's like, not even sure if that's true because she's like, kind of. He's like, thinks she's drunk maybe or something. And he's like, doesn't really understand what she's saying. And I thought that was all kind of confusing, and I still wasn't. By the time this all wrapped up, I wasn't exactly sure what. Why Denholm did that. Like, he alludes to, like, maybe like Timothy speculates that it was related to him having affair with Georgette, but he doesn't even know if Denholm knew about that or not. Or like, so you don't really ever find out or know why it happened in the book. And so I liked the movie just adding that scene in where Denholm, like, just explains, like, yeah, man, fuck you, you slept with my wife.
38:19
Speaker B: Okay. Finally a question about the 1930s.
38:23
Speaker A: Which composer legitimately might be my favorite story stories? I.
38:28
Speaker B: That's very interesting because was. We were watching the movie. I didn't dis. I didn't dislike that story. I liked it.
38:35
Speaker A: Well, there's a lot more of it in the book too, than.
38:37
Speaker B: But I also found it, like, vastly less interesting than all of the other stories.
38:42
Speaker A: I. I just. I think a big part of that is the. What is lost in translation from book to screen there. Because Robert Frobisher is a much more interesting character in the book than he is in the movie. But anyways, we'll get to that more. I have a lot of notes about it later, so.
38:57
Speaker B: But my question here is about the old composer that he goes to work with.
39:03
Speaker A: Yeah. Vivian.
39:04
Speaker B: Vivian Ayers, who wakes him up in the middle of the night one night about a melody that he's hearing in his head from a dream that he had. And he goes on to describe the dream and he's very clearly describing the neo soul cafe that we see. Yeah. With all of the fabricant workers.
39:28
Speaker A: Yeah. So that comes from the book. He comes to Robert in the middle of the night with a song that he heard in a dream in a cafe underground where all the waitresses had the same face and the food was soap. That is, he's describing Papa Songs, which is the name of the restaurant that Sunmi works at. I say works is a slave at. And fun book note in that. I was thought the movie was going to do this. But in that scene in the book when that happens and he comes and has that whole conversation and they like, he has to transcribe that song in the Middle of the night, Jocasta is hiding under the blankets in Robert's bed because they having sex.
40:03
Speaker B: I wondered if there was going to be a reveal that she was in there in the movie.
40:08
Speaker A: Because at that point I'm surprised they didn't do anything.
40:10
Speaker B: Yeah, we knew that he had slept with her at least at some point.
40:15
Speaker A: Yeah, they have an ongoing affair in the book that gets very messy and complicated. The book just kind of. Or in the movie they just sleep together once that we see. And then we don't really see Jocasta much.
40:24
Speaker B: Yeah, they don't really go into it.
40:26
Speaker A: There's a whole big thing with that in the book, which we'll talk more about. But yeah, in that specific scene they were having sex or she may have fallen asleep in his room or whatever. And he bangs on the door and she has to hide under the covers. And then he comes over and they're sitting on the bed next to her. That whole scene plays out. And I'm surprised they didn't include any of that in the movie.
40:48
Speaker B: I thought for sure that's where that was.
40:50
Speaker A: You can see the bed in the background. And I looked at it and I thought I saw like. I'm actually wondering if they shot it. And then it was just too messy and they cut it out because I was like, I feel like this is.
41:00
Speaker B: Already like an almost three hour movie.
41:02
Speaker A: I feel like I can see like a lump under the covers back there. And they just don't ever address it or it's an Easter egg for book readers.
41:09
Speaker B: Maybe back in the 1970s. Storyline. Halle Berry meets Tom Hanks in this timeline.
41:20
Speaker A: Yes, she's at the Seaboard is the name of the company who is creating a building a new nuclear reactor to power like the whole western seaboard or whatever. And she goes to their compound or.
41:34
Speaker B: Whatever purportedly to interview them, to interview them about whatever.
41:38
Speaker A: But she's really there to look into Rufus Sixmith's whole deal. Cause she knows he worked there. And she sees his office with his name scraped off the window. She breaks into his office and then Isaac comes in and then they start talking. And Isaac is also a scientist at Seaboard or physicist or whatever.
41:57
Speaker B: And he comes around to her side and manages to get her a copy of the report, which we don't ever really see it.
42:08
Speaker A: It's very clear in the book the report is just a report that says this gonna blow up and kill a bunch.
42:13
Speaker B: It's a damning report that she needs to do her journalism. So he manages to get that for Her. But then we see him get on a plane and they blow up the entire plane to get rid of this one guy. Is that from the book?
42:32
Speaker A: Yeah, that scene is pretty much identical, including Isaac Sacks monologue about time and the nature of time and his realization that he loves Luisa. And then right there, and then right after that, the plane explodes. All happens exactly the same. There's only the slight detail that's a difference. Is that in the movie. In the book, it's, I think, a smaller plane than what is shown in the movie. Maybe not. I'm not sure how many people were supposed to be on that plane in the. In the movie. But in the book, they say there were 12 people on the plane. So it's a relatively small plane. And one of the other people on the plane was the CEO of Seaboard, who they were also killing in that. Like they were doing two people in that. Yeah, we're just never introduced to that character because he's not super important. He's like a CEO who we think is evil, but then turns out he was not really super evil. And the people who were actually doing nefarious things also needed him out of the way. So they kill him. So, yeah, they do blow up a plane with 12 people on it to get rid of two people. Yes. Yeah.
43:29
Speaker B: Okay. This is going to be a complicated question because I'm going to have to give a lot of.
43:33
Speaker A: Yeah.
43:35
Speaker B: All right. So in the 1930s, Robert Frobisher storyline, he's been reading a journal.
43:44
Speaker A: Yeah, he found a journal.
43:45
Speaker B: He found a journal he's been reading. And it is the journal of Adam ewing from the 1849 story. But he was frustrated because it's only half of the book. Like, the last half of the book is missing. And then much later on in his story, after he accidentally shoots the old.
44:12
Speaker A: Composer, it's when he's leaving.
44:13
Speaker B: When he's leaving, we see that the latter half of the journal is being used, like underneath a table leg to keep it level. Is there a reveal that's similar to that of where the other half of that journal is? Is it being used under a table leg?
44:33
Speaker A: Yeah, that exact thing. Except it's a bed leg. And I think it is in the movie, too. It's hard to tell. You can't really see. I don't remember exactly, but it is. It was stuffed under. As he's packing up to leave Zettelhelm, which, again, the whole story in the book takes place in Belgium. They move it to Edinburgh in the movie for, I guess, probably like practical filming reasons or something, maybe would be my guess. But yes, when he's packing up to leave, he's gathering all his stuff up and he's looking under the bed and he sees it stuffed under one of the legs of the bed to keep it from the bed from wobbling. And he's like, oh. And then he grabs it and takes it with him.
45:13
Speaker B: Back in the 1970s storyline, we find out that what basically what is in the the report is that Big Oil is actually behind the whole nuclear plant thing because they want it to fail on purpose so that people will continue to buy their oil.
45:36
Speaker A: Yeah.
45:38
Speaker B: Is that from the book?
45:39
Speaker A: I'm gonna say no here, but it's also possible I misunderstood what was going on in the book because it's a little complicated. But I would say no. I think this is a pretty big change and it's one I quite like as a proponent of nuclear power. This is a change that I like just kind of ethically about the movie. In the book, the reactor is dangerous and all of this killing is being done by the nuclear company in order to cover up the fact that it's dangerous so that they can secure all of the money and build another one. And they already have like a bunch of contracts to build the second one of these nuclear reactors somewhere else. And they don't want that to get stopped because they'll lose all the money from that. So they're covering all of this report up. Rufus did this report and said, hey, this reactor has this technical issue. It could blow up and kill a bunch of people.
46:26
Speaker B: Yeah.
46:26
Speaker A: So. And that's why they get rid of Rufus, and that's why they get rid of his report and everything. The oil company in the book also wants the report because they want to take down the nuclear industry in order to keep selling oil to everybody. So they want the report. Like, there's another person, There's a character not in the movie named Fei Li. She's a woman who works at Seaboard as like, I don't remember what her role is, but we kind of learn a little bit about her and it turns out she's kind of like not a double agent, but she. When Luisa Ray's doing all of this investigation, she talks to Fei Li a couple times and Faye is like, hey, if you ever find that report. And initially we think Fay Lee is like fishing for information because she is trying to help the COVID up for Seaboard. But then it's revealed, actually she wants the report so that she can sell it to the oil company for a bunch of money. So the slight change here is that in the movie they make it that the. This whole thing has been orchestrated. They have intentionally made a reactor that's going to explode because they want to damage everybody's trust in nuclear power so that oil stays the predominant energy source or whatever. I like that because anything like nuclear power is a very safe, very good energy source that we should be utilizing as much as we possibly can. There are issues in some ways, but like, broadly speaking, nuclear power is very good. And so I always like cringe a little when like the plot line in the story is like, actually nuclear power is really unsafe and it's going to blow up and kill everybody. So I liked the subtle change here of oil is like use it. It's like false flagging a nuclear reactor explosion in order to doing a smear can. Yeah, exactly. I liked that it's a subtle change from the book, but I thought that.
48:23
Speaker B: Was, I mean, honestly, that feels to me like easier to explain like in the movie too. Like what you described in the book feels more complicated to me.
48:36
Speaker A: It's not way more complicated. It's pretty straightforward. It's a pretty straightforward, like, hey, this company has a big dark secret that they're trying to keep hidden so that they can keep making money. And they're just hoping it will never blow up because you know, they'll just like, it's not like a for sure thing that it's gonna explode. It's just like there's a. It's a very dangerous thing and they're just lying about how dangerous it is. It's pretty straightforward. And then everybody else is just trying to uncover the secret so that like, again, Luisa wants to uncover it to like save everybody. And there's like activists and stuff trying to be like, hey, this could kill a bunch of people or whatever. It's not super complicated. It's pretty straightforward. But again, I just like switching the motivation from this nuclear company is evil. The oil company's also evil in the book, but they're just evil in a different way. This one, it's like this nuclear company is also evil. And look, they all, whatever, it's a company, they probably are evil. But point being, I don't think you needed to besmirch the idea of nuclear power broadly, which again, the book doesn't really do that. But I think it's still kind of like a guilt by association of just like, you know, you hear enough stories where like a nuclear reactor goes bad and like, it just kind of Generally sours humanity against the concept of nuclear power, which I think is a bad thing personally.
49:53
Speaker B: So fair enough. In the Neo Soul storyline, Sanmi has basically been rescued from her life as a slave in this cafe by the rebellion. Essentially. I think they call themselves the Union.
50:18
Speaker A: Yes, the Union is the revolutionary faction.
50:24
Speaker B: And they're hoping that she can help them to spread their message. She says at one point, I think to the person who's in charge of.
50:37
Speaker A: I think she might be talking to. Hey Joo. Hey, Joo is the main guy.
50:42
Speaker B: Right.
50:42
Speaker A: She also may be talking to.
50:44
Speaker B: I thought she was talking to the General in this scene. Like the main guy in charge of the revolution.
50:51
Speaker A: Oh, APIs or whatever his name is. Yeah, yeah.
50:55
Speaker B: We only played by David met him like once.
50:57
Speaker A: Yeah.
50:59
Speaker B: But anyway, one of those people. Anyway, she's talking to one of those guys and she's expressing some trepidation that she can do this thing that they want her to do. And she says I was not genomed to alter reality. To which he responds no revolutionary ever was. And I really liked that. And I wanted to know if it was from the book.
51:24
Speaker A: Yes, that exact exchange happens in the book. And the. This book's gonna be banned in like three years. Just as a heads up like. Yeah, most likely like just when we get to the book bannings that this will be one of the books that is banned because it's a very revolutionary text in a lot of ways. Very much. And I have some more quotes and stuff that I will share later. But yeah, this, this book's gonna. Is gonna be banned because. Yeah, it is. That whole, the whole, that whole plot line is just about. Yeah. Revolutionary action to take down to topple.
51:59
Speaker B: Oppressive dictatorships back in the 1970s. Storyline. Louisa has joined forces with Joe Napier who's the head of security at Seaboard. And he's a good guy.
52:16
Speaker A: Yes, he was. I don't know if they explained this but I'll get to it or I just mention it here. He knows Louisa because he was a. Formerly a cop with Luis's dad. I don't know if that's explained in the movie or not.
52:27
Speaker B: Or they explained that they know each other. I thought it was like from the army.
52:32
Speaker A: Maybe they changed it in the movie. I don't remember. In the book him and his dad were. Or Joe Napier and Luis's dad were both cops and they were like the only non corrupt cops on their police force back in the day. And there's a specific thing that happens that is Joe Napier got into a sticky situation with some Other some nonsense. And Lester Ray, Luisa's dad, like, saved his life, basically. And so he feels indebted to Luisa.
53:03
Speaker B: But so they join forces and they have this plan to take down Bill Smoke, the hitman.
53:10
Speaker A: Yeah.
53:10
Speaker B: And they're running from him. And at one point they run into, like, the back end of what is implied to be an illegal business. Like a sweatshop. Yeah, like a sweatshop. And the hitman shoots a dog. We don't see it.
53:28
Speaker A: No, but, I mean, we see the dead dog.
53:30
Speaker B: We see the dead dog. Not up close. Does he shoot a dog in the book?
53:36
Speaker A: So, yes, technically one of his henchmen does. But that scene plays out almost identically. In that scene, Smoke is there with two henchmen with them. So one of the henchmen shoots the dog and Smoke is actually annoyed at him for doing it. But, yes, they just got rid of the henchmen in that scene. But, yeah, which we'll talk more about later because that was kind of a big change. Actually. It changes the outcome of one of the main characters because Smoke is the only character there. So we'll get to that, though.
54:03
Speaker B: All right. In the 1849 storyline with Adam Ewing, he's being slowly poisoned by the doctor on the ship who has convinced him that he has, like, a brain worm.
54:19
Speaker A: Says he has a brain worm.
54:20
Speaker B: And he's been giving him, quote unquote medicine, which is actually poison that's killing him. And I wanted to know if this particular scene was from the book, because this doctor is giving him another dose of this medicine, kind of implied to be, like, the fatal dose of it. And as he's doing this, he's, like, crazily confessing what he's been doing aloud. I mean, this guy's kind of like cuckoo bananas the whole time, but in this scene, he really goes wild. He really goes for it. Is this scene from the book?
55:03
Speaker A: Yes. Dr. Goose has a whole little spiel where he, like, mockingly has a conversation between himself and Adam. And as he's actively poisoning Adam and he's just making fun of him for being such an easy mark and villain. Monologuing like that is exactly from the book. Yes.
55:24
Speaker B: In the Neo Soul storyline, we find out that Soylent Green really is people, which Timothy Cavendish references earlier, which I.
55:36
Speaker A: Don'T think that's in the book, which I thought was a fun call forward.
55:40
Speaker B: The first time he's trying to escape from the nursing home, he's running around. Soylent Green is people. But here, Soylent Green really is people. And we Find out that the Fabricants, when they're done working, I guess.
55:59
Speaker A: Well, I'll explain what it is.
56:02
Speaker B: They think they're going to a retirement or some kind of thing.
56:06
Speaker A: I think they're going to Exaltation, which is when they reach their 12th star, which is every year, I think. I think it's a year they get a star on their collar and when they get 12 stars, they get to do exaltation. Or they achieve exultation, where they are told they get to go live in a farm upstate. Like a nice happy utopia. Yeah.
56:28
Speaker B: But what actually happens is that they are recycled back into soap, which is the food that they eat. So is that from the book?
56:38
Speaker A: Yes, that scene is identical. Like I said, they think they're getting on this boat to be taken to the happy retirement village or utopia that they've been promised that they will be going to. But in fact, they are just killed and harvested and recycled back into the system. In the book, they're explicit, not just. He mentions that they do use them for the food and stuff. And soap is different than food. Soap. In the book, it's never explicitly explained, but soap is specifically the thing that the Fabricants drink every night that keeps them docile. It's implied to be some sort of drug and nutrient thing that keeps them compliant to some extent. But also. And normally humans, purebloods, quote unquote, don't drink soap. Like, it's for Fabricants specifically, which is why it's kind of weird when they see Sir Re, the guy who's having sex with Yuna939 in that one scene, he who had been drinking soap or whatever, and she's like, was he drinking soap? Because Pure Bloods don't normally consume it because it's not for them or whatever. But on top of using it to make soap and other stuff, they. They. They like take the organs out of the Fabricants and sell them or whatever. They just completely reuse them for all kinds of different stuff. Yeah, they grind them up into food. They. Yeah, yes.
58:05
Speaker B: The Robert Frobisher story, 1930s storyline. We get to like the end of that story. And I guess this is kind of a Lost in adaptation. But he. So he kills himself.
58:21
Speaker A: Yes, we see at the beginning. Well, we don't know for sure that he's going to. We see him preparing for himself.
58:25
Speaker B: We see him preparing, but he does. He does kill him, kill himself. But he. He does it even though he knows, like, he knows that Six Smith is there.
58:36
Speaker A: Yeah. He goes up to the tower in Edinburgh. There's like. Which I've actually been up in. There's the. Whatever it's. I can't remember what the name of it is, but there's this like sightseeing thing in Edinburgh and he goes up there all the time. Which is translated from he goes to a similar high tower thing in.
58:55
Speaker B: Belgium.
58:55
Speaker A: Yeah. In Bruges. He's in Brute just outside. Or he's living in Bruges at this point in the book. And there's a. Like a church steeple or something that he goes up to every day. And so it's a similar thing. And yes, that scene is pretty much identical. He does or. Sorry, that. That storyline is pretty significantly changed. But that part is similar where he. He's up in the tower and he sees Rufus there but like hides from him and then leaves and kills himself. I guess this is a good point as any to talk about Eva. There's a whole subplot cut out of the Rufus Sixsmith plotline that is not in the movie at all. Jocasta and Vivian have a daughter named Eva, who initially, when he first meets her, she's like very cold and they don't get along at all. Which I. This is one of his thoughts about her, apart from her precious Nefertiri. Nefertiti, which is the name of her horse. Her hobbies are pouting and looking martyred, which I thought was funny. But she's like a. I don't know, she's like a college age kid and she goes away for school. She's actually not there most of the time at the estate that he's living at because she's like in Bruges, going to like, school or whatever. They don't get along initially. Eventually later on she shows back up and they kind of start getting along a little bit more. And then he thinks that she confesses that she, like, loves him. She has this like, very weird coy conversation with him at one point in this tower that he's in, where they're like in Bruges, hanging out, visiting together and she has this conversation about like, oh, I don't want to go back to school or something because there's this man who I've developed feelings for, who's here or something like that. And he's like, oh, really? And she's like, yeah. And he's this, that. And they're having this like coded back and forth conversation and he thinks that she's like being coy and talking about him, that she has fallen in love with him and Actually, she's talking about some other guy and she doesn't realize that he's in intuiting that like this incorrectly. Ultimately he confesses his love to her and like writes her a bunch of letters and stuff. And she just like, is like, oh, no, I do not. I was not talking about you.
1:01:24
Speaker B: Oh, no.
1:01:25
Speaker A: And this all kind of goes down after he has the falling out with. They start talking before he leaves Vivien, he gets in the big fight with Vivian Ayers and leaves. And then after he has left, he's just hanging out in Bruges, like spending the money that he made working for Vivian. And he's like, wondering why she hasn't. Because he left her, like letters when he left, like, confessing his feelings and like saying, like, I know you were talking about me and like, I feel the same way, blah, blah, or whatever. And then she like, never responds to him and he's like, what's going on? And he like starts stalking her around. It gets. I think I have some more notes about it later. So anyways, he keeps going up to that tower in the book looking for Eva, because she talks about how she likes going up in this tower every evening to look at the sunset or whatever. So he keeps going up there hoping he's gonna run into her, and that never happens. And at this point, he has already set his mind to killing himself. And when Rufus arrives, it's complicated, but he has already kind of made up his mind and is. He's not because of a lot of other things have happened. His name is in ill repute everywhere because of the fallout with Vivien Ayers. Vivian Ayers was like, I will ruin you or whatever. And he does. In the movie, he's on the run for murder or attempted murder, I guess, or whatever, which does not happen in the book. None of that is in the. Like, the shooting him is not in the book, which we'll get to. But anyways, he does know Rufus is there, but he's. There's more complicated reasons that he's killing himself. Yeah.
1:03:06
Speaker B: All right, my last question is from the very end of the Neo Soul storyline. And Sanmi has. So she broadcasts her message and then she gets recaptured by the regime. And before they execute her, she's interviewed by an archivist.
1:03:33
Speaker A: The archivist. Yeah.
1:03:35
Speaker B: And basically like tells him her story. And that's kind of like the framework for that story, which is that.
1:03:40
Speaker A: That is how the whole book works, is it's all in like question, answer, like format of this archivist asking her questions. And her recounting stuff. Yeah.
1:03:48
Speaker B: And so at the end of their interview, the archivist asks her, and what if no one believes this truth? And she says, someone already does. Which I thought was very powerful. Is that from the book?
1:04:04
Speaker A: It is not. But I thought this was a great exchange because I think you could interpret it a couple different ways. I think you could interpret it like, well, she's already made this speech. There are people out there who already believe this new truth about Fabricants being people and we gotta topple this fucked up system and blah, blah, blah. But I actually interpreted it slightly differently, which is that I think she's talking about him, the archivist. I think that exchange where he's like, what if no one believes this truth? And she says someone already does. She is talking about him already believing this. She can see and tell that his faith in this system has been shaken by the story she has told and that he is the one who already believes this. Which I thought was really cool. Again, not in the book. And I don't even know if him, like, kind of. I think there's definitely throughout the book, there are, like, moments in the interaction where you can see that she is, like, breaking down the archivist's like, beliefs about the system. Like, he has all these very ridiculous. And I have some notes about it later, but he has all these very ridiculous, like, beliefs about the corpocracy and the whole system that have been, you know, propaganda into his brain that he has never even questioned. And him sitting there having a conversation with her and asking her all these questions is slowly breaking down his conditioning and his, His. The. The propagandized state of his mind. And so that by the end, I love the idea that she's like. And he's like, what if no one believes this? He's like, well, you do so. And he's like, fuck, yeah. I. I thought that was great, but not in the book.
1:05:49
Speaker B: Yeah.
1:05:51
Speaker A: All right. Those were all of Katie's questions for. Was that in the book? But she does have a couple more things that we're going to talk about in Lost in Adaptation. Just show me the way to get.
1:06:01
Speaker B: Out of here and I'll be on my way.
1:06:03
Speaker A: Was it Lost? Yes. Yes.
1:06:06
Speaker B: And I want to get unlost as soon as possible. Okay. So the first thing that I wanted to ask about here was the structure.
1:06:16
Speaker A: Yes.
1:06:17
Speaker B: Because we talked about how the movie does kind of like quick cuts in between these different storylines.
1:06:28
Speaker A: There are times where. Yeah, jump.
1:06:30
Speaker B: It's jumping back and forth. Some segments are like a little longer than others are. But we. Everything's kind of all like mixed together.
1:06:39
Speaker A: We jump from timeline to timeline to timeline, or not timeline, but era to era to era of these different stories pretty rapidly throughout the movie. And we just kind of cycle through all of them as we move towards the end.
1:06:52
Speaker B: Yeah. And that was not the vibe I had gotten talking to you about the structure of the book.
1:07:01
Speaker A: Yeah.
1:07:01
Speaker B: So I was wondering how you felt like those two things compared.
1:07:09
Speaker A: I was glad you asked this so much to say here, because this is the biggest difference between the movie and the book. And it's probably the most influential element that will affect my final verdict. The book structure, in my opinion, is kind of what makes the book. It was a very singular reading experience. If you have not read this book, I would highly recommend it. Especially if you like the movie. Highly recommend the book. Even if you don't like the movie, I think you might like the book still because the structure of the book is so. It's. It was so interesting that, that as I was reading it, I. I was like, I've never experienced a book like this. I don't know, I can't say for sure that no other book had done anything like this before or since or whatever, but I had never read a book like this. And I'm a sucker for clever. And boy, is the structure of this book clever. So I was gonna read this because I think this helps give a good outline of the way it works for people who have not read the book. And this is from a foreword of a PDF of the novel that I found online. Cloud Atlas is a novel composed of six interlacing narratives, each one housed within the next, so that the first is a book read by a character in the second, the second a series of letters cherished by a character in the third, the third a populist novel being considered by a publisher in the third, and so on. To fully realize this Russian Doll experiment, Mitchell divides each half of the each tale in half and places them sandwich fashion at opposite ends of the book. Thus, the opening narrative is the last to be concluded, the second, the penultimate, etc. At the center of the novel lies the Indivisible Doll, an unbroken post apocalyptic tale wrapped fivefold. Despite this, in symbolic intratextual concept, further emphasized by the unifying themes of recurrence and predation, each narrative stands as a novella in its own right. So. So that gives a pretty good idea. But basically the way it works is you read the first half of the Journal of Adam Ewing and then it just ends it gets cut off mid sequence. And this is what I was talking to you about, where I literally was like, do I have a misprint? And I'm sure that was a lot of people's experience reading this because you're just on page 39. The sentence is Sunday 8th December. It's like a new journal entry, Sabbath. And this is Adam Ewing's Sabbath not being observed on the prophetess. This morning, Henry and I decided to cond a short Bible reading in his cabin in the low church style of Ocean Bay's congregation. A straddle the forenoon and morning watches. So both starport and port shifts might. And then the next page is just blank.
1:09:45
Speaker B: Okay.
1:09:46
Speaker A: And then the next page after that is letters from Zelda Helm. And you launch right into Robert's story and you're like, what? What's going on here? And I was so glad I wasn't spoiled for how this worked upon reading it. And I was like, well, I guess that's right because I looked at the page numbers and everything, and it's like, okay, it's correct. So that gets cut off. Then you start reading Robert's story and he finds, as you mentioned earlier, the journal of Adam Ewing. But it starts. It's missing, like the second half of it. And you realize, oh, that's it's missing the part that you're missing. So it ends where it ended for Robert Frobisher when he was reading it. So then you're reading Robert Frobisher's letters to Ruford Six Smith Rufus Sixmith. He even opines in his letters when he's talking about this. He's like, hey, I found this journal. That's really interesting. But he's like, there's something shifty about the journal's authenticity. It seems too structured for a genuine diary. So it even gets meta. And the fact that the characters within the story, these are supposed to be real stories, like the journal is supposed to be in this universe, a real historical artifact. But there's even this meta pulled back layer where one of the character, Robert, is reading the journal and is like commenting on how it feels somewhat artificial and written like it's written for a narrative. Because it is, because it's part of this book. Yeah, but he doesn't know that obviously within the universe. So it gets extra, extra meta. But he complains that it abruptly ends mid sentence, 40 pages in. And you're like, oh. I was like, oh, my God. Oh, that's. Oh, that's so cool. And that was like, really interesting. And he asked six Smith if he can find the rest of it. It obviously he doesn't. We figure out how he finds the rest of it and when he gets it under the bed, some others like. And so each story does that where it references the previous version. So then, like the letters, like you said, Luisa in her story, she finds the letters and is reading them, but she doesn't have all the letters. She only got, like, half of them. And she gets the rest of the letters later from Megan Sixmith, the daughter of Rufus. So that's how we're able to get the rest of the second half. And then Timothy Cavendish's story is his. Him journaling, like, him writing down the notes of what happened to him. But he has a stroke in the middle of it, which is not in the movie at all. He has a stroke and that interrupts his narrative. And we jump to the next one. And then so it just continues on and on like that. Like, for instance, when we get to the. The middle one, which is the whatever, what the heck is it called? Slu Crossing. And everything after that is the furthest in the future one that is the one sandwiched in the middle. That is the sixth story that's also very meta because so the. The movement of the music in the story is called Cloud Atlas Sextet, and it is six movements. And it's described in the book that the piece of music is six individual solo pieces that are each abruptly interrupted by the next piece of the music, which is also the structure of the book we're reading. It's very meta in a way that is incredibly, like, satisfying and cool. And you're like, how did you do this? Like, how did you come up? It's like a magic trick. It's like, super fascinating. And like, for instance, that middle one, the sixth one that ends at the very end of that, they get one of the pieces of technology that Marine M. Has, Halle Berry's character in that has is a thing called an orison, which is like a recording device. And it's the recording device that San Mi's testimony to the archivist was recorded on. So at the end of that middle story that ends with way in the future, Zachary's grandchildren talking about Zachary's story that he was telling, which is everything that happens in that middle story. They're like, well, we don't know if all of those tales. Because we see that in the movie, like Tom Hanks at the end, like, telling the grandkids kids. Like, that is the same structure where he's like, telling the story of what happened to him to these kids. But an additional thing that doesn't happen in the movie is that in the book, he finishes that up and then we move even further ahead and we interact with one of Zachary's grandchildren. And they're kind of talking about Zachary and being like. We don't know if what he told us, all the stuff he told us was true, but what we do have is this little metal thing that he said he found called an orison. And here, hold out your hands. Look. And one of the kids holds out their hands, and when they pull it in their hands, it turns on and it plays the rest of. And then we cut back to. So then we are now looping back around, okay, to Sun Mi's story, which was. It went. So Sun Mi's story was right before the sluice story. And then right after the solution story, we go right back to Sun Mi's story. And then we go in reverse order back towards. Towards the beginning.
1:14:41
Speaker B: Okay, all right.
1:14:43
Speaker A: And then. But it, like, then collapses in on itself, like, in this very fascinating way where the end of the sluice's story leads directly into where we pick up the Sun Mi story. And then Sun Mi story leads directly into. Is that when Sun Mi, at the end of her. Which this is not in the movie either, which is, again, it's so clever and brilliant in the movie. Is that in the book or in the book. Sorry, is that in the book? She didn't get to watch the entirety of the ghastly ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. They were watching it, and then they got interrupted. I think this happens in the movie. They get interrupted by, like, a raid coming to arrest them or whatever. That is the same thing that happens in the book. But then when she gets to the end of her, like, recounting everything that happened to her, she asked the archivist. The archivist is like, all right, we're done. Final requests or whatever. And she goes, yeah, can I have your Sony and the codes to your Sony or whatever. And he goes, why? And she goes, I want to watch a movie I didn't get to finish. And then she watches the end of the ghastly tale of Timothy Cavendish, which jumps us back into the finishing his story. And then we get to the end of his story. He is editing Louisa Ray's. There's a pulp novel written about the experience of Louisa Ray, like, the whole, like, thing with the seaboard and everything that got turned into, like, a pulp, like, detective novel. Okay. And he is editing that. And then so he finishes editing the second half of that. And that is what then jumps us back into her story. And then she gets the rest of the letters from Megan Sixmith, which lets us finish the rest of Robert Frobisher's story. And then he finds the end of the journal, which lets us finish the end of Adam doing story.
1:16:38
Speaker B: Damn.
1:16:38
Speaker A: It's insane. It's brilliant. It's again, I think, singular in literature, maybe. I don't know. I don't want if anybody else knows if there's a book.
1:16:51
Speaker B: I don't think I've ever read anything that sounds like what you're describing.
1:16:54
Speaker A: It's like I said, it's one of those things where it's. It's brilliant. And I don't know, there is the. The book even references a specific line where it says, like, it gets very meta again and says. When Frobisher is talking to Rufus about the Cloud Atlas Sex Tech Sextet music piece, he says, it's this thing where each of the solos. There's six solos, and each of them interrupts the previous before each of them resolves or whatever. And he goes, I can't tell if it's gimmicky or revolutionary. And that is like, you know, it is clearly the author talking about this format for the book that he has come up with and is like, I cannot decide if this is gimmicky or revolutionary. And I would argue it's revolutionary because. But it's also kind of gimmicky, right? It's one of those things where it's like, I don't think you should try to do this unless, like, it. And we had this conversation. It reminded me a lot of when Memento came out and every annoying film student wanted to make the next Memento. I bet there were a ton of annoying literate writing students.
1:18:05
Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
1:18:06
Speaker A: Who read Cloud Atlas and tried to write the next version of this. That, like, is like a genre bending, format breaking thing. And like, I know. So I know there are people who are gonna probably compare it to things like House of Leaves, which is a very different. But like, I know there are other, like, format bending and breaking types of novels, but from my understanding, like, House of Leaves is a very different beast than, like, what this is. This is pretty straightforward. It's very, like, digestible, like, revolutionary, brilliant. Again, it's not hard to, like, parse or understand or anything like that anyways. I think it's just incredible, as you said. The movie, on the other hand, kind of ends up being a more of a standard movie experience.
1:18:49
Speaker B: Yeah.
1:18:50
Speaker A: With just multiple storylines kind of playing out at the same time. Like, I've seen that style of movie before.
1:18:56
Speaker B: Definitely.
1:18:57
Speaker A: I don't know if I've seen exactly that style of movie. Like, it's still kind of unique, but it is not. I've never read a book that does what this book does. Like, never even close. And you had a note later that I thought made sense to talk about here, which was that you thought it would make sense you would have been happy with any of these stories as like, a standalone.
1:19:18
Speaker B: Yeah, that was just the thought I had when we finished up the film. Like, again, I really liked the movie. I liked the way that everything kind of like, interplayed with each other and it all, like, kind of like, locked together. Yeah. I always enjoy that kind of thing. But I also, like, if you had just shown me a standalone film about any of these storylines, I would have been happy with that movie.
1:19:41
Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. They're all very, very good on their own and have a lot. They're all very interesting on their own. That leads to me, though, because I wanted to put that here because what I think would have been the most interesting way to do this movie, and I understand why they wouldn't do it this way, but what I think would have been the way to do this movie, that is the closest to honoring this very unique structure of the book.
1:20:05
Speaker B: Yeah.
1:20:06
Speaker A: What the movie does is interesting because it. And I have more of this in my final verdict. But the movie structure allows you to really see, like, all of the similarities between the stories. There's a lot of next to each other, which. Which is in the book, but they're just dozens of pages apart.
1:20:21
Speaker B: Yeah.
1:20:22
Speaker A: And so you have to, like, remember, like, oh, that's similar to that scene. Or this thing is similar to that thing from the other. Like, but in the movie, they're able to like, literally splice those scenes to play, like, back to back. So it's very obvious what's going on. But what I think they could have done, that would have been more in keeping with the unique kind of format breaking structure of the book would be to keep the structure of the book where you start and you play just the first part of the first story and then it abruptly ends and you jump into the second part. But what they should have done is you have either maybe not different directors for each one of those segments, but at the very least, you do completely different styles. You really lean into the genre of each story.
1:21:11
Speaker B: Would have been interesting.
1:21:12
Speaker A: Because for the most part, the movie looks mostly the same.
1:21:14
Speaker B: Yeah.
1:21:15
Speaker A: Throughout all the different segments. But the, The. The first part, that's the historical drama. Shoot it like in 18, like a. Like an older style, like or. Or like a. And some of those. I guess part of the issue is that some of them don't have as distinct, like, filmic language. And that's right off the bat as some of the other ones. But, like, you could come up with a way to do it, but maybe shoot the, The. The. The first part, like in black and white as like a, you know, this kind of like, historical period piece kind of thing. Then the second part where we get into the. The, like Zettelham. The. The musical. They're the music. The composer part. The Robert Frobisher story, that's more of like a romantic story that's steeped in like, the film language of something like A Room With a View or something like that. And then when you get to the Louisa Ray story, that shot like a pulp detective movie, and like, really lean into, like, stylizing each of the segments within each of those stories, but have them play out in chunks, have it be boom, boom, boom, and then have it resolve the way the book does. I get why they didn't do that. Because. And this was something the author talked about, like, nobody wants to watch a movie where the. Where the story starts over for the sixth time an hour and a half into the movie or whatever.
1:22:38
Speaker B: Yeah.
1:22:38
Speaker A: And like, I get that, but I think. I don't know, I. I think it would have been awesome. I think it could have been awesome because I think that would have more accurately. Accurately recreated the experience of what the book is doing. So I don't know. I like. I said I like a lot about how the movie tells the story. I think the movie tells the story very effectively. It just maybe it. In a more tradition. It's actually funny because a lot of reviews and stuff talked about how audacious and kind of brave the film was in terms of being this very strange thing. And I'm like, yeah, kind of. But it's not nearly as unique as the book is. It's much more of a straightforward film, traditional movie than the book is a traditional book, which is a little disappointing. And again, we'll get to more. I'll talk more about it in my final verdict. But that is the biggest difference and arguably, in my opinion, the biggest point in the book's favor.
1:23:41
Speaker B: All right, okay, so my next question here. And I was able to parse more of this as the story went on. But I would like a little bit more information if you have it. In the New Souls storyline, the Fabricants, are they supposed to be like clones? Are they just like grown in a lab? What exactly is going on there?
1:24:10
Speaker A: Yeah, the Fabricants are. They're clones that are created in womb tanks and raised for specific jobs. They are a slave labor class of people that are specifically created without memories, without anything.
1:24:23
Speaker B: So we kind of Brave New World.
1:24:25
Speaker A: It's been a while since I've read Brave New World, but I'm sure. Yeah, maybe. But they are designed specifically for whatever task. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. Specifically for whatever job they're put in. But they're also. There's like certain like models. So the reason she's called Sanmi451 is that there are a bunch of other Sanmis. Sanmi is a specific. Which is why in the movie we see multiple.
1:24:49
Speaker B: With her face occasionally others that look like her.
1:24:52
Speaker A: And then there are other ones that look. There are multiples of different girls and stuff like that. Yeah, it's the same thing. Where there are. There's like different. So Yuna is one of the models and Yuna 939 is just one of the Yuna's. Sanmi 451 is one of the Sanmis. Exactly. Or et cetera. But yeah, they're created specifically for. And I. My understanding is we only ever see and interact with the ones that are made for. To work at Papa Songs. Yeah, but. Which is just a restaurant. But there are other ones for other. There's this. The whole system runs on slave labor of these clones, essentially.
1:25:28
Speaker B: Okay.
1:25:29
Speaker A: They are the labor class that are. Yeah, yeah. The whole story is about exploiting a lower class like a labor class and killing them and how capitalism is bad. That's the whole Neo soul story.
1:25:43
Speaker B: Right. Okay, my last question here. And I spent a lot of time trying to parse this when we were watching these segments. In the far future post apocalyptic storyline, Halle Berry plays a character from a more advanced culture.
1:26:08
Speaker A: Culture Marinem is her name. Yeah.
1:26:10
Speaker B: Who comes to visit the Tom Hanks.
1:26:15
Speaker A: Yeah. They're called the Valley People, the Valleys Men or something like that. Yeah.
1:26:20
Speaker B: And I was wondering if she was speaking their dialect while she was there or if that was more of like a. A broadly spread dialect that everybody speaks in the far future.
1:26:38
Speaker A: Yeah, I had that same question in the book. And it's kind of hard to tell because the story. That story is told from Zachary's perspective and we never hear her talk Outside of the context of talking to him or other of his people. The vibe I got was that she and her people probably normally spoke a similar, but maybe slightly different, elevated, less, I don't know, not slang. Maybe slang heavy is the right term. I don't know, like a lesson.
1:27:13
Speaker B: Yeah, it's hard to describe what exactly because the dialect that they speak is kind of simplistic, but not.
1:27:23
Speaker A: Yes, it's a lot of. It's actually a very clever. I think compared to something like, oh my God, what is that Will Smith movie that we did on After Earth? They tried to do like a future dialect in that that I thought was really cheesy and bad. This one feels to me pretty feasible and like, well thought out.
1:27:46
Speaker B: It does kind of feel like it's all recognizable, but it also kind of does feel like a language that has, like, deteriorated.
1:27:57
Speaker A: Yes, it's very clearly our English that has been turned into this different thing that has a bunch of slang and like conjunctions and shortenings and all these different things that are recognizable. It also sounds, and I think this is intentional, it sounds in some ways like an older dialect to us. It sounds like some forms of like, early. I don't even know.
1:28:25
Speaker B: Like, it kind of gave me like old western vibes.
1:28:29
Speaker A: But like, just for instance. And obviously if you watch the movie, you would have heard it. But first, second, third days depression woman was wormian into my dwelling got to fetch. She didn't behave like no queenie bee name. She never lays the beat. She helped Sussy with Darien and Ma with twinning and spinning and Jonas took her bird eggin and she listened to catkin yipping bout schoolry and she fetched water and chopped wood. And she has a quick. And she was a quicksome learner. So it's just a lot of like, combining words and like putting like turning like specific actions now have like slang terms for it like sewing something or like working with yarn is twinning and spinning. Like that is what they call like if you're weaving something is twinning and spinning. And it's a lot of stuff like that. And I have some. When we get to it, I have some more. There's some great stuff in this. Specifically. Some of the slang they have for sexual stuff is unbelievable, which we will get to. But anyways, Zachary does have one interaction with one of the men that Maranim is like, talking to on her communicator. And he seems to speak with less of a dialect in the like, one sentence we hear from him. But it's hard to tell because it's like one sentence and there are sentences even that like Zachary and his people speak sometimes that sound fairly normal. So I. I don't know. But my guess would be that it. They speak a slightly different, maybe less, less intense, like, form of this language. That is, they probably speak something. If I had to guess, something closer to our version of English.
1:30:08
Speaker B: Yeah.
1:30:08
Speaker A: Than what these people do. But it's still similar. Ish. Maybe it would be my guess. I don't know. Know if you do know if you're. If you're more of a big fan of this book and can explain that.
1:30:18
Speaker B: Yeah. Because I found that, like, not distracting during those parts of the movies. But I was very, like, invested in trying to figure out if she just spoke that way or if she was trying to, like, integrate herself in by, like, copying their speech.
1:30:37
Speaker A: I don't know for sure. But again, I assume she's. She's putting it on and integrating herself because she comes across in the book like she's basically kind of like an anthropologist. She talks about. There's a line at one point in the book about how if my president ever found out, my whole faculty will be disbanded. About her giving them medicine. Which me implies that maybe she's kind of like an anthropologist who's like, supposed so that to me feels like maybe she has studied their language and stuff and not maybe. I know that that's why she's there, is to learn about their stuff, to learn their ways and kind of like. Like study them, basically. So the implication I get is that she has learned how to speak their language from school or whatever or something like that. All right, that was it for all of Katie's questions. Boy, do I have a lot to talk about. Specifically in Better in the book. You like to read.
1:31:34
Speaker B: Oh, yes, I love to read.
1:31:36
Speaker A: What do you like to read?
1:31:40
Speaker B: Everything.
1:31:41
Speaker A: A lot of these are just gonna be lines. Cause, boy, this book is packed with some bangers, so we will get into them. But this was when Adam meets Dr. Goose for the first time on the beach. He sees Goose, like, looking. Combing through the beach, looking for teeth. And he says. Or he writes down in his journal. His nationality was not surprise if there was any Eyrie so desolate or isle so remote that one made their resort unchallenged by an Englishman. Tis not down in any map I ever saw. Just commenting on the colonial colonizing nature of the English. As I mentioned earlier, the movie doesn't cover any of the historical background of the Maori and the Moriori. Which is kind of important context for the whole story. In the book, it's explained that the Maori show up and they conquer the Moriori, but their travel to the island goes so poorly that they're all, like, sick and fucked up and injured when they get there there. And the Moriori are very naive and very, like. They're like a super peaceful. This is according to this thing. I don't know how accurate historically the song is that. What is accurate historically is that the Maori did massacre and kill all of these Moriori people. But I don't know all the details how accurate it is, but the story is relayed in the book is that the Moriori were this completely, like, peaceful culture who had had very strict rules against violence or killing or anything. So they were just completely, like docile, peaceful people. And so when the Maori show up and they're all injured and sick and ill, the Moriori naively nurse them all back to health and then are massacred by the Maori, basically. They kill, like, half of them that are on the island. And the English people there talk because there are some English people on the island at the time. They say they couldn't do much because there's only like 50 Englishmen and like hundreds of these Maori there. Although there's allusions in the book made to the fact that the English didn't care, obviously.
1:33:40
Speaker B: Right. I mean, you wouldn't really expect them to.
1:33:42
Speaker A: Yeah. And now at this point in the story, fewer than like a hundred Moriori remain. And Atua is described as being potentially like one of the final remaining Moriori who's still alive. And Adam, as he's recounting this whole history and talking about it, says what moral to draw law. Peace, though beloved of our Lord is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience. Yeah, yeah.
1:34:08
Speaker B: Interesting.
1:34:08
Speaker A: This book. I'm telling you, man, this book is chock full of it. It is. I mean, it's 2000. I think it was written in what, like 2004 or something like that? Yeah, yeah. But it's. It'll. It's a very timeless book. One of the things that when he's talked, Atua kind of relays his travels because he was a sailor. And that's. He explains to Adam that he. He is a very adept sailor because he's traveled all over the world on ships. And he talks about how everywhere he saw that casual brutality that lighter races show, the darker. This is a fun little detail that didn't make it into the movie that I thought they should have, which Is that when the captain brings him up on the deck and asks him to prove that he's a good sailor or whatever. In the book, he initially asks. He points at one of the masts and goes. Goes, here, lower the mid mast. And Atua just kind of stands there and doesn't. And, like, looks at him awkwardly. And Adam is like, oh, shit, did I, like, back the run? Like, is he. Was he lying to me? And he's not actually a sailor, but then. Or he asked him to lower the mid mast, and he points at this. This thing. And then a Tua kind of sits there and looks at him. And then he goes, that's not the mid mast. That's the mizzen mast. And he. So he caught that the captain was trying to, like, with them and, like, get them to be. So he's like, well, that's not the mid mast. That's the mizzen mast. And so they're like, all right. Also, in the book, they don't actually shoot at him. So that scene plays out similarly where the captain says, like, get out your gun and aim at him. Yeah, but they're just doing that. Like, and it is still cruel and evil and blah, blah, blah. But they don't actually shoot. In the movie. He just, like, has him fired or kill him. In the book, the implication is, like, if he fucks up at all, they will shoot him. Okay, but he doesn't. So they don't shoot him. Like, and in the movie, it's just kind of weird that they just decide to shoot him anyway. Like, he's like. And then Adam has to, like, stop him. And it's. I don't think that made it really all that much sense. The whole point is, like, if we. If you fuck up, we'll shoot you. So don't fuck up. And he doesn't fuck up, so they don't shoot him. But anyways, there's a very funny thing when Dr. Goose starts prescribing, he's like, don't worry. I have the medicine that will kill this. This beast in your brain or whatever the. The parasite that he has. And it is very, very obvious that what he is in fact giving him, which we do not see in the movie, is just cocaine.
1:36:36
Speaker B: Oh.
1:36:37
Speaker A: Henry's powders are indeed a wondrous medic medicament. I inhale the precious grains into my nostrils from an ivory spoon, and on the instant an incandescent joy burns my being. My senses grow alert. My. My limbs grow Lethean. My parasite still writhes at Night like a new babe's finger, igniting spasms of pain and dreams, obscene and monstrous. Visit me, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, it's like, oh, he's just giving him cocaine in those scenes. Yeah.
1:37:02
Speaker B: Isn't that what old time doctors did?
1:37:04
Speaker A: Yeah, which is why initially I didn't catch that he was corrupt and poisoning him. Like the book. When we get to Robert Frobisher story, he catches on to that. He's like, oh, this doctor is poisoning him and I have to see how this goes. And I was like, oh, whoa, is he. Because like at this point. And that becomes a little more obvious in retrospect, especially thinking back of how he met the doctor, which is that he's on the beach looking for teeth to make into, to sell to idiots overseas as like dentures or whatever. He's like a con man. It's very clear that he's a con man. But yeah, initially I didn't, I wasn't sure because again, the medicine was so bullshit back then anyways. And I'm like, I don't know, maybe what I. There's a line in the movie where when Robert is talking to Rufus and saying that he's going to this famous composer to study under him and to work for him, he says, I know you haven't heard of him. He goes, I'm going to work under Vivian Ayers. I know you haven't heard of him in the movie. That's what he says in the movie. The line in the book I think is a lot better. And it's because this is the version of Robert's character that is in the book that I enjoy much more. Is he says in the book you won't have heard of him because you're a musical oaf, but he's one of the greats. He's a very. Robert is like this very messy, mean guy. I say mean. He's not really mean, but he's very selfish.
1:38:35
Speaker B: He sounds bitchy.
1:38:36
Speaker A: He's very selfish. He's a very bitchy gay. He is. He's like, yeah, he's saucy. He like, he's even to Rufus, who he actually cares about very deeply. He's very rude and teasey and that sort of thing. He also is constantly abusing, not abusing Rufus, but is abusing Rufus niceness by having him send him money and stuff like that. He's just. He's a con man. He's out for himself. He's self obsessed with his own importance and his desire to create this super important music really? So that he can prove his dad wrong. He's got fuck daddy issues because his dad kicked him out for a bunch of different reasons. But. But yeah, his dad kicked him out, so he has to prove to his father that he's gonna be the best composer England's ever produced and blah, blah, blah. And he's just a lot messier and meaner of a person than he is in the movie, which is why I think he's a much more interesting character in the book. He's still like. You still like him and you root for him. But that's also true of all the characters in the book. Nobody is a good person. They're all just different versions of. Of. That's not true. Like there. There are good people, but they are all good within the context of their time periods. Like, nobody is just like an overtly like, great person who has like, across the board good morals. Like Adam McEwing, despite the fact that. Or Adam Ewing, despite the fact that he ultimately becomes an abolitionist. Has some pretty iffy views on race still. Like that are espoused in the book. Like talking about like. Like how certain members of the. When he first arrives on the islands and stuff, certain members of the people he can tell were just recently came out of the jungle and like, he like based on their skin tones and, you know, he has the racism of the time period and stuff like that. So all of the characters have those faults. And I think the movie just kind of partially. Cause you can't. You're not in their head to hear all those thoughts. But anyways, another thing that I like about Robert that the movie or that the book makes more explicit is that he is a messy bisexual king, which they talk about about in the movie. But he. In his letters, as he's talking to Rufus, he talks about the. How he's like been hooking up with girls and stuff. And one of the lines he says that I thought was funny as he's talking to Rufus is, girls fascinate in different ways. Try them. One day he's like, keeps trying to convince Rufus that he should try out women. But Rufus is just gay. He is not into women. Another line that is in the book that doesn't make into the movie. This is a line by Jocasta was. The note I had was, oh, look, Jocasta was an annoying poly person back in the 1930s, but they're talking about, like, fidelity and stuff. And this is after she's been sleeping with Robert for a while. And she says to him that love Loves. Fidelity is a myth woven by men from their insecurities, which I thought was funny. She also implies that she fucked Claude Debussy.
1:41:39
Speaker B: Oh, nice.
1:41:40
Speaker A: When he stayed there, he stayed at their home briefly. And Robert is like, I don't know if I believed her, but he was a notorious skirt chaser and a Frenchman. So she's probably telling the truth.
1:41:53
Speaker B: Well, I mean, if he was French.
1:41:54
Speaker A: Yeah, that's literally like. And he was French, so it's probably. She's probably not lying. Also another line that I thought was great where Robert is thinking about trying to. Like, he's thinking about the affair he's having with Jocasta and glad that Vivian Ayers hasn't figured it out yet. But he's like, I bet the help has figured it out. Because he said. And in the line he says is, oh, we above the stairs like to congratulate ourselves on our cleverness, but there are no secrets to those who strip the sheets. Also another line, I believe Robert says this. Whoever opined money can't buy you happiness obviously had far too much of the stuff in relation. He's talking about like somebody he saw who. I can't remember what it was, but yeah, it's just a great line that also comes back later. There's a similar somebody later in the story says whoever appined to money can't buy you happiness obviously didn't have enough of it. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in the Luisa Ray storyline, I mentioned Fei Li earlier. She's a woman who works at Seaboard and is there on her own deal, like trying to. She's seemingly working for the company but also wants to sell them out. If she can get her hands on the report, she's going to sell it to an oil company or whatever. But her and Louisa do commiserate briefly on being women in the workplace. In the 70s. Faye had a dude sexually harass her and she. She was talking about how like she tried to figure out, went through all these different ways of what she should do about it. It of like potential responses like, should I laugh about it? But that'll be like, they'll just keep harassing me. Then, oh, should I like hit him? I'll get fired, should I? And she was like talking about all this. She's like, ultimately what I settled on was I got him transferred to Kansas because she was high enough up in the org or whatever, but it still didn't matter. Like, Everybody calls her Mr. Lee because she's so cold and like cruel to this guy or whatever. And I just Thought that was a nice little exchange that they get to have. The movie alludes to some of that with like, the whole exchange with her and Lloyd Hooks, who's like, I could get on board with this women's lib thing if they all looked like you or whatever. Yeah. While trying to get a train to the Aurora house in the Timothy Cavendish story, he tries to. The trains, like all fuck up and stop running and it's all a big nightmare. And he tries to get a train ticket refund, but he can't get a refund because all of the companies are owned by like the same three companies. And it turns into this insane bureaucratic nightmare of trying to.
1:44:31
Speaker B: Yeah.
1:44:31
Speaker A: Get anything done and it doesn't work. Also, there's this aside about how. Which I thought was very funny, that all of the British trains, the actual trains themselves, are built in mainland Europe as part of, like, their nationalized rail system. That, like, mainland Europe has, like a nationalized rail system. The UK is all privatized. The trains are built. The trains for Britain are built in mainland Europe. But mainland Europe has to import the shitty, shitty privatized rails from the UK to test the cars they're making on to make sure they will work in the uk because the rails in the UK are so bad from their shitty privatized system that they have.
1:45:17
Speaker B: Yeah.
1:45:17
Speaker A: That they can't build the train cars and test them on their own, like rails, because those rails are too nice. In the nationally funded, like, rail system system that they have in mainland Europe. Which I just thought that was funny. Again, again, the whole book is about how capitalism is a nightmare and is destroying the world. It's literally the whole thesis of the book, basically. And it's not the whole thesis. It's honestly more about like, systems of oppression and stuff like that. It's just capitalism is one of those systems of oppression. Another fun line from Sun Mi's storyline where the archivist says to her, popular wisdom has it that fabricants don't have personalities. And she responds, this fallacy is propagated for the comfort of pure blends. Also, she starts saying. She's talking about how the fabricants are slaves. And she's saying that. And the archivist stops her and he's like, excuse me, the slaves do not exist. The word slave is outlawed. And Sanmi is like, are you a child? Did they send the most new naive idiot that they have to interview me? She said, hypocrisy is built on slavery, whether or not the word is sanctioned mentioned. Why did they send me Somebody like this, like, what is wrong with you? She just, like, can't believe he's, like, bought so fully into the.
1:46:34
Speaker B: Yeah.
1:46:35
Speaker A: Corporacy lie that he's like, no, there are no slaves. And she's like, the fuck? Yeah, there's no slaves because we don't use the word slave, but we're fucking slaves. What are you talking about? In the movie, we see Yuna run for the. She's the first Fabricant who tries to, like, escape, and she, like, runs for the elevator, but then they, like, blow up the thing in her neck and kill her killer. It's slightly different in the book, and I think I like it slightly more where she actually gets into the elevator in the book and she grabs a kid. Because you have to have a soul. And Fabricants don't have a soul. And it's not entirely clear in the movie or in the book whether they mean an actual metaphysical soul or, like, a piece of technology called a soul. Because there are physical pieces of technology that they call souls that are inserted into. Into their fingers that are basically like RFID chips that allow them to go places.
1:47:30
Speaker B: Yeah.
1:47:31
Speaker A: Anyway, so she knows you have to have a soul to get. Use the elevator. So she, like, kidnaps a kid and takes him into the elevator with her to, like. So she can use the elevator to get to the surface. And she gets up and everybody, like, freaks out. And, like, everybody in the restaurant's panicking because she just, like, runs out with this kid. But then after everything calms back down, the elevator comes back down and opens, and she's just laying in there on the floor, like, riddled with bullets. And the kid is, like, cuddled in the corner, like, sobbing. And so, like, she made it to the surface, but immediately was killed by police as soon as she got up there, which I thought was kind of horrifying in a different way than her just neck just exploding. And then it's fine. Whatever. In the book, it is absolutely implied that papa songs is McDonald's.
1:48:19
Speaker B: Oh, God.
1:48:19
Speaker A: Like, future McDonald's. Let me find the line here, which I thought was very funny. Mr. Chang sat in front and the Ford edged into traffic. I saw Papa Song's golden arches recede into a hundred other Corp logos, and a new city of symbols slid by. Most entirely new. So they mentioned several times the golden arches of Papa Songs. I'm like, okay, yeah.
1:48:42
Speaker B: All right.
1:48:43
Speaker A: So it's. Yeah. Also, this is fun. The Fabricants don't ever change elevation where they live, and they're not designed for it. And so the first time she has to use a staircase, it's, like, incredibly difficult for her. And she says, I battled gravity for the first time step by step, which I thought was interesting. And yeah, every time it's mentioned that they have to go up or down stairs, sometimes he just has to hedge you to see has, like, carry her because she can't do the steps well. So there's an entire section of San Mi's story that is cut where she spends time as the research project of a spoiled rich kid at university. This is when. This is actually when she reads a ton and becomes really educated. The movie just glosses over this entirely. Ultimately, we end up at similar places. And I get why they call cut all of it, but it has some interesting stuff in it in the book. Basically, when she's at Papa Songs and the Siri is, like, dead in his office. Yeah, she gets taken out that night, but she gets taken by Mr. Chang and this other guy and she gets given to this college student as, like, a research project. And they do, like, research on fabricants. Like, that's a whole nother thing they do. And there's this whole subplot with that. I completely understand why they cut it because it's very complicated and there's a lot going on with it and there just wasn't time to get into all that of. Of it. But one thing that I thought was interesting is that one of the things that really starts her path to radicalization is that when she gets to the university, she's introduced to another Fabricant named Wing027, who was another student's project or whatever, and he is very friendly to her, and he gives her a Sony, which is what she's able to, like, watch a bunch of stuff on and read a bunch of books on. But Wing 027 is accidentally killed by his student researcher or whatever. And her student researcher who, like, owns her, just, like, thinks it's hilarious and is, like, laughing about it with his friends. And this is like one of the first dominoes that pushes her down the path to radicalization.
1:50:54
Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
1:50:55
Speaker A: They also play this awful game where they of, like, William Tell with her, where they keep putting smaller and smaller things on her head while trying to shoot them off with a crossbow. She is not killed, but she does get her ear shot and, like, ripped open. But in that scene, she is rescued by Professor Mephai, and that's when she leaves. And that's when she then goes to the little, like, room that we see where heju takes her. That's like all the. Like.
1:51:21
Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:51:22
Speaker A: She then leaves the university and goes to there, and from there it's pretty similar to the end, so they just cut all that out. Also, I thought it was interesting, in the movie, Miphe or Mephi or whatever his name is, is not a professor. He's Boardman Miphei. And he's the guy who comes in played by Hugo Weavis.
1:51:38
Speaker B: Yeah.
1:51:39
Speaker A: Who comes in and is like the big bad villain of the corporation or whatever. In the movie or in the book, he's a professor who is part of union. He is, like, working to subvert the whole system or whatever. So I thought. I don't know, I thought it was interesting. They changed his. They gave his name to a villain in the movie. Seemed weird to me. Also, once he takes her while she's living in that little apartment, she actually gets to attend university. Like, he's like, hey, you should go to classes and stuff. But she gets picked on for everyone, picked on by everyone for being a Fabricant. And she's, like, trying to understand why everybody hates her and, like, why everybody's like, doesn't want her in class and stuff with them. And Mipha explains it by saying Fabricants are mirrors held up to pureblood's consciences. What purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror when they might. When might they blame them? And then she asks when might they blame themselves? And he says, says, history suggests not until they are made to. And then Heiju is introduced in the book as one of Mipha's like, other students who he sends to help entertain San Mi because she's, like, bored staying in the apartment by herself all the time. So that's how Heju enters the story in the book. Also, there's a little thing mentioned that in this Neo Soul future, they project ads onto the moon.
1:52:59
Speaker B: Good God.
1:53:00
Speaker A: Yep. And the moon is just, like, covered in advertisements.
1:53:03
Speaker B: Don't give them ideas.
1:53:04
Speaker A: Yep. Oh, it's coming. It'll happen 100% and it'll be the worst. Oh, Somi also, as I said, she does a bunch of reading in this time, and she kind of starts piecing together the history of the world and stuff and kind of revels at the fact that corpocracy started emerging in the early 21st century. But then the social strata wasn't marked by Fabricants versus Pureblood. It was marked by money. And curiously to her, the amount of melanin in someone's skin, she thinks that's interesting. Because that's not really like now. It's the. The social casts are fabricants and pure bloods. But, yeah, getting to Zachary's story. Kind of a big change that I think works better in the book is that in the movie, Zachary is played by Tom Hanks, who is like 45 or whatever. In the book, Zachary's character is 16 for most of the story.
1:54:02
Speaker B: Oh, okay.
1:54:04
Speaker A: Which I think works a bit better just broadly with kind of the type of character he's playing. And in the book, that opening scene where he sees his family die, in the movie, it is his brother and his brother's son that are killed. In the book, it is his father and his brother that are killed. So not a big change, but similar thing when Marinem shows up on the island and is, like, living with them and learning their ways. She starts teaching classes because she's very educated and the kids put blackface on themselves to look more like her because they want to be smart. And she has to. She has to explain to them that smarts isn't about the color of your skin. But I thought that was a. Interesting, fun, you know, subversion is that she's a black person in the book and. Or has darker skin. I don't know if she's a black person specifically, but she has darker skin. And so, yeah, they're all like, well, people with dark skin are smart because all these kids. Yeah, that was funny. Also, this was cracking me up. I was like, did this book invent the usage of sussin or sussy? And it. Because they do use it, which is like a Gen Z slang now. But he does. They do absolutely say at one point, but why are you here? Sussing our lands. Suss in our ways. Sussing us. Which is just. I thought that was funny, like. Cause I think that all spawned from among us in the video game. Among us. I think people started saying you're sus. Like, sussy, sus, whatever. Because, like, suspicious, right? And that's. I was like, oh, that's. They're using it the same way in this. That's interesting. I just thought that was fascinating because this is way before this was written way before. But it kind of like predicted the usage of that even in a very near future, which I thought was interesting. This is a fun line that Zachary thinks to himself again, which makes more sense because he's 16 in the book and wouldn't really make sense in the movie. But he thinks to himself as he's trying to figure out what Marinen's up to what all is going on. Oh, being young ain't easy because everything you're puzzling and angst and you're puzzling and angst in it for the first time.
1:56:13
Speaker B: So true.
1:56:13
Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that was a good. This cracked a child in the Valley People community whose name is Fuckugli.
1:56:23
Speaker B: Oh no.
1:56:24
Speaker A: Which is very funny. So in the movie, Zachary convinces Marin to help Katkin after she gets her stung by the scorpion fish by telling her that he'll climb Manasoul with her because she wants to go up Manasoul and he says he'll go up Manasoul with her. There's a difference. In the book what happens, which I think is way more interesting is I understand why they make this change in the movie. It helps spur why he goes and everything. And it's a more direct like transactional thing that is just a lot cleaner. But in the book he convinces Marin and to help Katkin by confessing his deepest secret to her, which is what happened at Sluice's Crossing, which is that he just hid and watched his father and brother get killed and died. Didn't try to help them or do anything. And he's felt immense guilt about this for his entire life. He's only 16 and only happened a couple years ago, but I think he was like 12 when it happened or something and there was nothing he could have done, obviously it was a whole. But he's always felt really guilty about this. But he tells her that because. And he says like, look. And she won't do it because they have like a prime directive which I hadn't really touched on here, which is alluded to in the movie, but they have a prime directive where they like don't intervene. They don't. Which for prime directive for people who don't know is a Star Trek thing. But the idea is that it's a super advanced race. When they show up on these less advanced civilizations, they don't give them technology or help them, do they? Just similar to the idea of nature photographers not intervening with what's going on in nature, that kind of thing. So she doesn't want to help, but he convinces her to help one because she likes Catkin and doesn't want her to die and she feels bad about not helping already. But when he tells her this scene secret, he's like, look. She's like, well, if I help now, you'll just. Anytime anything else happens, you'll. You'll try to get me to help again. And I can't just keep doing this. And he goes. And he tells her the secret and goes, look, just this one time, if you. If I ever ask you again or try to, like, blackmail you into, like. Or try to convince you to do it again, you can tell everybody the secret about me and they will all hate me because I, you know, I. I didn't do anything to help or whatever. And this is, like, what convinces her to help in this moment, which I thought was interesting. Also, a little detail that I love in the book is that when she gives him the anti venom, there are two people inside, like, trying to help Katkin. It is the abbess who we see in the movie, who's, like, the matriarch of the community, but who's also, like, a herbalist or something like that. It might even be two different characters, but there's an herbalist trying to help help, and then there is a, like, a witch doctor trying to help who we actually see in the movie, who's the guy who, like, shakes. And she says, specifically in the book, if this works, and I'm not saying it will because she's very far gone, but she says, if this works, make sure the herbalist gets credit and not the shaman. She's like, he's not doing anything. The herbalist is at least trying and doing some stuff that could help. Like, yeah, yeah. She's like, please don't. Please don't push the, you know, the superstition. Further along. There's a reference in the San Mi storyline that the bad guys, the corpos, have a torture weapon that they shoot people with that makes them scream in agony to reveal their position, that they, like, hit him with it. And then. And so, hey, you has to kill one of the other union members after he gets hit with this weapon to shut him up. And also not to shut him up. He. He would die anyways. He's, like, being literally tortured from the inside out. But I just thought that was interesting. She meets Ancor APIs, who we see in the movie towards the end, who's, like, the leader of the union.
2:00:08
Speaker B: Yeah.
2:00:08
Speaker A: The first time she meets him in the book, he appears as a hologram of a carp, which I thought was fun. And he's specifically described as, like, emerging from the chest of Sami or some other character, which I just could see so vividly in the movie that's such, like, a distinct visual. I could just imagine this character, this holographic carp, emerging from somebody's chest in this, like, dystopian, not Daft Punk, cyberpunk dystopia or whatever. It just felt very on the nose and also like a very much the kind of visual stuff that the Wachowskis love. So I was amazed we didn't get that scene. But yeah, he uses the carp. The holographic carp is like a disguise so that people don't know what he looks like initially. This is another fun line that I, Sunmi, says to the archivist at one point, corpocracy's only strategy is that long favored by bankrupt ideologies. Denial. Basically just talking about how like she's explaining, like, this is all gonna fall apart. We're like, this is. We're destroying the world and blah, all these things. And the archivist is like, well, if that were true, they would do something about it. Blah, blah, blah. Like, why are. You know, like the government would do something about it if that were like Kripocracy's only strategy is that long favored by bankrupt ideologies. Denial is another great line. The plan was to engineer the simultaneous ascension of 6 million fabricants. So apparently they have some plot that they're like, if we can figure out a way to have all of these Fabricants achieve ascension, which is just sentience basically, and like breaking out of their haze that the government keeps them in or whatever, they're going to try to get all these Fabricants to kind of realize that this at the same time so that they can start this uprising. And so the plan was to engineer the simultaneous ascension of 6 million fabricants. And the archivist replies, fantasy lunacy. And then she replies, all revolutions are. Until they happen. Then they are historical inevitability. Yeah. Oh, and then another great line right after that, the archivist asks, so like, you have this big plan and everything, but why not just push for incremental change? Why would you not like work within the system to blah, blah, blah, blah. And she. She's like, to quote a 21st century or 20th century politician or something, an abyss cannot be crossed in two steps. I was like, God damn, so many. It's like, it's. Every line in this book is like that. Another great line. Neo Socorpros has no communities now, only mutually suspicious substrata. Just like they're. This corporacy has destroyed community entirely. It's just a bunch of mute groups that all suspect each other of being evil and bad. I know, it's so. It's like, oh my God. There's a scene in the book that doesn't make it in the movie where as they're traveling to the place, the coast where the boat is so that he can show her the boat where they kill all the Fabricants. They stop on this bridge and a rich guy shows up with his wife and throws a child off the bridge, killing it. And it's a doll. It's like a Fabricant doll, like a child's toy, but it's like a person that they. But it's because she's like an old model that the kid doesn't want anymore. And he says it's too expensive to get rid of it legally, so he just throws her off a cliff and kills her. And yeah, it's. Yeah, there's a great little passage just about rights and the way rights are maintained or not maintained. The archivist says, like, it can't be true that Papa Song is doing all these evil things and, like, killing all the. Like this. He's basically saying the slaughter ship where they kill all the Fabricants can't be real. And because it's. If Fabricants weren't paid for their labor in retirement communities, the whole pyramid would be the foulest perfidy. And she says, business is business. And he says, you've described not business, but industrialized evil. Oh, wait, sorry, I gotta skip ahead. That's not the wrong. We're not the right path passage. And he says, no crime of such magnitude could take root in Neo. So corporos, even Fabricants, have carefully defined rights guaranteed by the Chairman. And she replies, rights are susceptible to subversion, as even granite is susceptible to erosion. My fifth declaration posits how in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the other engenders fear. Fear engenders hatred. Hatred engenders violence. Violence engenders further violence until the only right, the only law, or whatever is willed by the most powerful. Yep, it's part of her manifesto. Anyways, then we get back to Timothy's story. He's editing the Half Lives, and I thought it was funny that he says the rubbish about Luisa being Frobisher reincarnated has gotta go. Cause it's. He's like, I also have a similar birthmark, but no one has ever compared mine to a conversation Comet, but not realizing that he is also the same person reincarnated, but he had a. Again, it's played on by his experiences. He mentions that he had a girlfriend who used to call it, like, Timothy's turd or something like that. But, yeah, he clearly also has it. But, yeah, he's like, you gotta get that rubbish about her being reincarnated out of there. Oh, this is great. So Veronica, who's the lady who's part of the jailbreak at the old folks home, has this great little line about, like, passage about why the elderly are treated the way they are. What offenses they commit against society. Oh, once you've been initiated into the elderly, the world doesn't want you back. Veronica settled herself into a rattan chair and adjusted her hat just so. We, by whom I mean anyone over 60, commit two offenses just by existing. One is lack of velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down, it cannot abide. Our second offense is being everyman's memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny eyed denial if we are out of sight.
2:06:29
Speaker B: Hmm.
2:06:29
Speaker A: Yeah. Oh. So the scene where Timothy runs off in the middle of the night to call, in the movie he calls Denholm, but in the book he calls and it's Georgette whose answer is. But he gets found out that he made that call, which is against the rules, and Nurse Noakes is gonna punish him for it, but he gets. He escapes punishment by saying that St. Peter came to him in a vision and told him that his brother was dead and that he needed to call his sister in law. And Nurse Noakes in this whole institution is very Catholic and religious. And so they're like he says, just complete bullshit. But he says it knowing that she'll be like, fine. And then my last note for Timothy Cavendish's story here, I believe, is that the movie has it end with him reuniting with Ursula. He says, like Solzhenitsyn laboring in Vermont, I shall beaver away in exile, far from the city that not in my bones. Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return one bright dusk. That's the final lines of. Of the part in the book. In the movie they have him add on, unlike Solzhenitsyn, I shan't be alone. And then like, Ursula is there with him, which to me just felt a little easy. He does not reunite with her in the book. It's especially easy because again, in the book, Timothy Cavendish kind of sucks. He's kind of racist, he's kind of sexist, and just not a great guy. Overall, the movie really like smooths him into like a likable, eccentric old coot that we're rooting for. And he still is that in the book, but he's also racist and kind of sexist. And like his whole story starts off with a little aside about how These three slutty teenagers attack him on the street and he has some very vulgar things to say about them. And when he's going through the whole train ticket debacle, he's really mad at the teller who's not able to do the transaction he wants or whatever. And he refers to her constantly as Nina Simone just because she's black. So he's just kind of a shitty like guy. But again the movie just like don't worry about any of that. In Luis's story there's some incredible. Just I cannot stress this enough. She's at one point she's on the run, she gets back to her mom's house and her mom is hosting this big party with her mom's like a rich person who has like this big like fundraiser party going on. And there are these three obnoxious, just obnoxiously racist idiots there called the Henderson triplets that are spouting about how corporations are the future and are a representation of true meritocracy and stuff like that. And I cannot express enough how their rhetoric is literally just today's Republican party rhetoric. The Henderson triplets dominate the discord at the matchmaking table. Each is a blue eyed and each is blue eyed and gilded as his brothers and Luisa doesn't distinguish amongst them. What would I do? Says one triplet, if I was president first I'd aim to win the Cold War. Not just aim to not lose it. Another takes over. I wouldn't kowtow to Arabs whose ancestors parked camels on lucky patches of sand. Or to red slur for some people, I'm not exactly sure. Vietnamese people maybe. Or to red G words I'd establish, I'm not afraid to say it, our country's rightful corporate empire. Because if we don't do it, the slur for Japanese people will steal the march. The corporation is the future. We need to let business run the country and establish a true meritocracy not choked by welfare unions, affirmative action for amputee, transvestite, colored, homeless, arachnophobes. A meritocracy of acumen. A culture that is not ashamed to acknowledge that wealth attracts power and that the wealth makers us are rewarded. When a man aspires to power, ask one simple question. Does he think like a businessman? Men. Louisa rolls her napkin into a compact ball. I asked three simple questions. How did he get that power? How is he using it? And how can it be taken off the son of a.
2:10:38
Speaker B: Arachnophobes thrown in there?
2:10:39
Speaker A: Yeah, but it's actually Fitting. It's that like, just.
2:10:43
Speaker B: Yeah, like, you know, whatever.
2:10:45
Speaker A: Whatever the, like, thing that doesn't even necessarily make sense. It's just like, oh, they're. They're some minority group that I hate or for whatever, you know. Yeah. Joe Napier gets retired early by Seaboard, and they're like, hey, get out of here. Don't ever come back. We don't. Because he's like, not corrupt, but they. And they're not going to kill him, but they just want him out of their hair or whatever. And they send him and he's like, all right. And he's like staying in his cabin up in the woods. And he keeps trying to talk himself into just staying in the woods and fishing at his cabin. But his guilt, he has this guilt about he actually helped Smoke kill an activist named Margot years ago. He didn't realize that was what was doing, but he, like drove Smoke somewhere to do something and didn't realize what it was. Found out later that he killed this woman who was like an anti nuclear activist or something like that. And so he's kind of always been guilted by that. But also he wants to help Luisa because her dad saved him back in the day. But another thing that the movie changes that I wasn't a huge fan of, is that in the book, Joe Napier dies. In the movie, he does not die.
2:11:51
Speaker B: Yeah.
2:11:51
Speaker A: So in the movie, we talked about this earlier, but which they do pretty much nail this. And I'll talk about this more later. But he. In the book. Sorry, in the book, a lot of that stuff plays down. We'll talk more about the sweatshop scene later. There are other people there. Smoke does not die in that scene is the important part. One of the other henchmen dies in that scene, not Smoke. So in that scene, that lady beats him to death with the pipe and it's Smoke. Smoke is not the one who dies in that scene. They then leave that. That sweatshop and they make it to. Later on, they make it to. Rufus has a boat that he has, like in a marina where he has a copy of the report. It's stored in this boat. They get there, but Smoke finds them there and shoots Joe. Napier, who's there with Luisa, shoots Joe. Joe falls over, seemingly dead on the ground, and Smoke is about to kill Louisa. But Joe comes to enough to pull his gun and kill Smoke. So they kill each other and Luisa survives, gets the report and publishes it, blah, blah, blah. But I like Joe. I don't like Joe dying necessarily. I like his character. But it feels fitting that with his storyline that it ends that way, that he goes down fighting for.
2:13:11
Speaker B: Thematically resonant for him.
2:13:12
Speaker A: Yeah. The Frobisher has this little aside in one of his letters to Rufus where he says, never met a quack whom I didn't half suspect of plotting to do me in as expensively as he could contrive. Which is obviously the whole plot of the Adam Ewing Henry Goose story. A lot of that happens in this, where there are allusions to the plots of other stories. I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but Robert's descent in the madness in the book is a lot sadder. As I said, he does not shoot Vivian Air for refusing to give back the Cloud Atlas sextet. The movie adds this, I think, to give him a reason for his kind of chaotic, manic mental state after he leaves Zettelhelm. But in the book, it's a combination of things, including the fallout with Eva that I mentioned earlier, where he professes love to her, he's obsessed with music and Ava, and he's like, stalking Eva around town, hoping that she'll notice him. And then this scene is incredible. That was super sad. Wasn't in the movie. Movie is that at one point he storms into this big party that she's at and causes this huge scene, like, asking where she is. And she comes down and they have this big confrontation where she's like, what are you talking about? I'm here with my fiance. Yeah, I didn't reply to. And this is where she really spells it out to him, like, yeah, I didn't respond to your letters because I don't love you. I wasn't talking about you. I was talking about this guy. And he's just crashes his whole worldview. But as this whole conversation is happening, there was a band playing, a sextet playing in the background. And all of them stop playing, except the trombone player keeps playing Ode to Joy. And as they're having this conversation, I'm just imagining this trombonist playing in the background. But then at one point, Robert, as he's having this argument with Ava, turns around and screams at the trombonist. Either play Beethoven in the key it was intended, or do not play it at all. And then the trombonist stops playing. And that was such. I was like imagining that scene in the movie being very, very funny, but it just does not happen. But anyways, she breaks up with him. He just. And he just, like, really falls into madness. And like, again, he's. It's hard to describe but it's very clear that he's just, like, losing his mind after all of this goes down. Down. I talked about this a little bit earlier, but in the book and at the end of Adam Ewing's story, they land on an island that is being taken over by a Christian mission, which is run by Preacher Horrocks, who we met in the beginning of the movie. He lives in this big house on the island. And there's some great symbolism and kind of imagery here where the dining table, they feast. They talk about how the ants are, like, a huge problem on this island. Ants are fucking everywhere, and they get everywhere. And so when they eat dinner, the. The four legs of the dining table are in bowls of water so that the ants can't crawl up onto the table while they're eating. But he says we have to change the water regularly to clear the ant corpses away because they'll make a bridge of their own bodies.
2:16:08
Speaker B: Yeah.
2:16:09
Speaker A: Which to me felt like it was alluding to the idea of the people that this. That they are oppressing. And they have to, like. If they allow them to. To build up too much or whatever, they have to call them routinely in order to stop them from being able to.
2:16:28
Speaker B: To, you know, to band together.
2:16:30
Speaker A: Yeah. And get to them and that sort of thing. Yeah. Also, the mission has a Nazareth smoking school, so that he goes to the church. They have this big church on the island. And Adam goes up there one day and sees a whole congregation of. Of the indigenous island people in there, all smoking pipes. Like, he's like. He thought the church was on fire when he first sees it. Cause there's so much smoke coming out of it. And then he's talking to the guy who's leading this, and he's like, oh, yeah, this is the Nazareth church smoking school. And he's like, what are you talking about? And he's like, oh. And he explains that they're getting all of the natives addicted to tobacco so that they have something that they need to spend money on. Because he's like, well, here's the issue. All these native people, if they're hungry, they just go get food or, you know, hunt something, fish something, whatever. If they're. Whatever. Like, they can get everything they need. They have everything they need. So we're getting them addicted to tobacco so that we have something we can sell them. It's like, oh, Jesus. The Preacher Horrocks does rank the races at dinner, which is what we saw briefly started at the beginning of the movie. He, like, starts into that conversation. He's like I have my theory of the races or whatever and then he like gets cut off and then we don't hear the rest of it. But that does come from the book where he has this whole I have always unswervingly held that God in our civilizing world manifests Himself not in the miracles of the Biblical age, but in progress. It is progress that leads humanity up the ladder towards the Godhead. No Jacob's ladder this, but no, but rather civilization's ladder if you will. Highest of all the races on this ladder stands the Anglo Saxon. The Latins are a rung or two below lower still are Asiatics. A hard working race none can deny, yet lacking our Aryan bravery. Sinologists insist that they once aspired to greatness. But where is your yellow hued Shakespeare, eh? Or your almond eyed Da Vinci? Point made, point taken. Lower down we have the Negro. Good tempered ones may be trained to work profitably, though a rambunctious one is the devil incarnate. The American Indian too is capable of useful tricks tours on the Californian barrios. Is that not so, Mr. Ewing? I said it is so. Now our Polynesian, the visitor to Tahiti o o Hawaii or Bethlehem for that matter, will concur that the Pacific Islander may, with careful instructions acquire the ABC of literacy, numeracy and piety, thereby surpassing the Negroes to rival Asiatics in industriousness. And he just has this whole big Good grief. Yeah, it's yeah. But then from there we have some other good stuff where Henry kind of talks about like, and this is really interesting, Henry kind of rebuffs him and I got to just read some of this because I thought it was just some of the best stuff in the book. The first of so Goose says, well, why under scrutiny? Is it obvious? Ethereum is redundant with basically Henry Goose says like hey, your whole theory there is bunk because it's unnecessary. And he said, and he's like I have my own law. And he says what law would that be, sir? The first of Goose's two laws of survival. It runs thus the weaker meet the strong do eat, which we that's a recurring thing in the movie. But your simple law is blind to the fundamental mystery. Why do white races hold dominant dominion over the world? Henry chuckled and loaded an imaginary musket aimed down its precious barrel, narrowed his eye, and then started the company startled the company with a bang. Bang. Bang. See? Got him before he blew his blowpipe. Mrs. Derbyshire uttered a dismayed oh. Henry shrugged. Where's the fundamental mystery? Preacher Horrocks had lost his good humor. Your implication is that white races rule the globe not by divine grace, but by the musket. But such an assertion is merely the same mystery dressed up in borrowed clothes. How is it that the musket came to the white man and not say, the Esquimio or the pygmy? If not by August. If not by August. Will of the Almighty. Henry obliged. Our weaponry was not dropped into our laps one morning. It is not mana from Sinai skies. Sinai's skies, Mount Sinai, whatever. Since Agincourt, the white men has refined and evolved the gunpowder sciences until our modern armies may field muskets by the tens of thousands. Aha. You will ask, yes, but why us Aryans? Why not the Unipeds or Ur or the Mandrel drakes of Mauritius? Because, preacher, of all the world's races, our love, or rather our rapacity for treasure, gold, spices and dominion, oh, most of all, sweet dominion is the keenest, the hungriest, the most unscrupulous. The rapacity. This rapacity, yes, powers our progress for ends infernal or divine, I know not. Nor do you know, sir, nor do I overtly care. I feel only gratitude that my maker cast me on the winning side. Side? Henry's forthrightness was misconstrued as incivility, and Preacher Horrocks Napoleon of his equatorial Elba was pinkening with indignation. I complimented our hostess's soup. And then there's another. There was another great. Oh, and then Adam goes on to kind of talk about him later. His confidence has made me uneasy, and I ventured that Henry might practice a little reserve when disagreeing with our host. Dearest Adam, I was practicing reserve, and more than a little I longed to shout this at the old fool. Why tinker with the plain truth that we hurry the darker races to their grave in order to take their land and its riches. Wolves don't sit in their caves concocting crapulous theories of race to justify devouring a flock of sheep. Intellectual courage, true intellectual courage, is to dispense with these fig leaves and admit all peoples are predatory but white predators, with our deadly duet of disease, dust and fire. Firearms are exemplars of predacity par excellence. And what of upsets me. And then Adam adds on, it upsets me that a dedicated healer and gentle Christian can succumb to such cynicism. I asked to hear Goose's second law of survival. Henry grinned in the dark and cleared his throat. The second law of survival states that there is no Second law, eat or be eaten. That's it. But yeah, it's just. There's a lot of really good stuff. The books. It's a good book. You should read it. I can't read the whole thing, but I might. Fun little thing that doesn't make it into the movie is that when they get back and Attua saves Adam and is like trying to get him off the ship, he gets confronted by Borehave who's like the second in command or whatever and doesn't want to let Adam off the ship. And Atua just like kicks his ass and throws him overboard and then takes Adam off the ship, which I thought was fun. And then finally, basically my last thing for better in the book is that the whole ending with Adam confronting Tilda's father and being like, I'm an abolitionist in the movie felt a little clumsy and overly expository to me. In the movie, I will say the book ends basically the same way with Adam thinking about what his father in law would say. But it felt a lot better to me reading it than actually seeing it play out in the movie. And I just. I got one more time. This is my final time reading, I think, but I gotta read this. The final two pages of the book. I think they're worth reading real quick because it explicitly states the thesis of the novel. It is. It's why I was kind of talking about earlier that this book is, while difficult to read in some ways, is also not super subtle in like what it's saying. Yeah, the end of this. The end of the book is this. My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially at night. And this is Adam writing in his journal. It's the very end. When I hear naught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles through an unhurried eternity, my thoughts flow. Scholars discern motions in history and formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises and falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit, history admits no rules, only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts and virtuous acts. Acts. What precipitates acts? Belief. Belief is both prize and battlefield within the mind and in the mind's mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation and bestiality. Such a humanity is surely brought into being, and history's horuxes, boarhaves and gooses shall prevail. You and I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it? If our consciences itch. Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage and our legacy? Why fight the natural oh weasel order of things? Why? Because of this one fine day a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost in an individual. Selfishness uglifies the soul. Soul? For the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is this the doom written within our nature? If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth and claw. If we believe diverse races and creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree. If we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable and the riches of the earth and its oceans shared equitably. Such a world will come to pass. I am not deciding. It is the hardest of worlds to make. Real torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword. A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit. Not one I fear Jackson shall inherit. This strikes me as a life worth the living. Jackson is his son. Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the abolitionist cause. Because I owe my life to a self freed slave slave. And because I must begin somewhere. I hear my father in law's response. Oho fine whiggish sentiments, Adam, but don't tell me about justice. Ride to Tennessee on an ass and convince the rednecks that they are merely whitewashed negroes and their negroes are blackwashed whites. Sail to the old world. Tell them their imperial slaves rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium's. Oh, you'll grow horse and poor and gray in Caucasus. You'll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with men metals spurned by backwoodsmen, crucified, naive dreaming, Adam. He who would do battle with the many headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain. And his family must pay it along with him. And only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet it. Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops? And that's the final line of the book. But it's just. I mean, like I said, it's. It's pretty explicit. Like that's what this book's about. Do little good things at whatever you can to fight oppression and injustice. Basically it's like the whole thing. And then my final note for better in the book is I didn't really need confirmation that Zachary and Marinem get off Earth. That's how the movie ends, is that we see them like, oh, look, there's Earth up in space. And it's like, okay, sure, fine, whatever. It's not even alluded to that they're trying to get off Earth in the book. Like, you can infer maybe that's what. But there's no. They just go to a different place and start again or whatever. So whatever. All right, time to talk about the stuff I thought was better in the movie. My life has taught me one lesson, Hugo, and not the one I thought it would. Happy endings only happen in the movies. I thought the movie nailed Ayers to dictating music to him. Him, where he's like, just, like, saying it out loud. And he's like, what? And he's trying to write it down. That's exactly what happens in the book. But I did, like, there's a subtle distillation of Robert transforming Ayers dictation into something actually good, where he's, like, playing what he dictated, and it doesn't sound that good. And he's like, nah, that couldn't be what I was thinking of. And then he starts, like, playing with it and turns it into something beautiful. And he's playing it as they're walking out of the room. And Robert turns around and goes, yeah, yeah. Yes, that's my melody. Like, that's my melody. Like, it's like, no, that. And that's a big part of the book is. And it's about art and, like, the weird nature of, like, what. What of what they're creating is Roberts versus Vivian Ayers. And it's mostly Robert, but Vivian Ayers is taking credit for everything that Robert is doing because, like, Robert's actually doing all the work, which is also reminiscent of, like, just general class struggles and stuff like that. It's. It's a whole lot. But. But anyways, I liked in the movie that Unit 939 punches out that dude who was sexually harassing her before she makes her escape attempt. That does not happen in the book. But I liked adding that layer of, like, sexualization to which is not really. Well, it is in the book, but it's different. I just like the guy, like, grabs her ass earlier in the first scene. And just like, they're objects to these people, not people. I thought hearing the inflection and being able to see the performances during the Sluicea story, which is the one that happens the furthest in the future with the very Interesting dialect made parsing what they were saying much easier versus reading it in a book. It's complicated. It's a mix of both. It's also helped that we had subtitles on, because it would be way harder without subtitles. But in the book, you're just purely doing context clues, trying to figure out what the words they're saying are. Are. But when you're seeing what they're talking about and, like, also seeing how they're saying it, it's a little easier to kind of figure out, like, what is meant by some of the stuff that's being said. This is what I was talking about earlier. Jesus Christ. The smut in this book, which there's not much. It's like two lines, but it is so upsetting. And it all happens in the. The Slusha storyline. This is one of them. He's talking about when he had sex with some girls, like, when he was younger. We'd got a feverish Hornian for each other. I was Slurpeein her lustsome mangoes and moistly fig.
2:30:22
Speaker B: Oh, no, I don't like that. Nope, don't like that.
2:30:27
Speaker A: And then later on in the story, this actually happens right before the Kona attack happens. There's a whole subplot where they go to this big yearly market where they have everybody from the island goes to this big market and trades stuff, but they also have a big party or whatever, and they go to that and they have this big party and he sleeps with a girl. And the next morning the Kona attack and, like, kill everybody, which we see later in the movie. But. And he sleeps with this girl from another tribe. And when he wakes up the next morning, he says, I woke up feeling. Or I woke up aching and feeling all good and scooped. You know how it is when you shoot up a beaut. Some girl, which just again, was cracking me up. I do think aching and feeling all good and scooped is not an increase. Correct description of.
2:31:13
Speaker B: Yeah.
2:31:14
Speaker A: That feeling. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, there's a truth to that. But. Yeah. The shoot up a beam girl was. Was like. Oh, God. Yeah.
2:31:22
Speaker B: Yeah. You know, when we were talking about the dialect earlier, I said that it reminded me of, like, it was giving, like, Old west to me. And I don't think that's accurate enough. What it reminds me of is, like, how a prospector talks.
2:31:39
Speaker A: Yes.
2:31:39
Speaker B: In a movie.
2:31:40
Speaker A: Yes. Yeah. 100%. Absolutely. Yeah. So the scene in the movie where Robert comes on to va and this is the thing that spurs their falling out is not in the book, okay, I think it's an interesting change. So I. In the book, the falling out is caused because he finds out about. Or they have this big falling out. Basically. Basically, it's a similar thing where Robert starts confronting him about taking credit for his work. Robert's like, hey, I did this. You're taking credit for my work. I'm gonna leave if you don't give me credit for this. And he goes, vivian Ayers goes, you can't leave, because if you do, I'll tell everybody that you had an affair with my wife. And he finds. And we realize in this moment that Vivienniers knew he was sleeping with Joseph this whole time, which we didn't know he knew, but he knew this whole time that he was sleeping with Jocasta. And he goes, I can ruin your reputation. I will. And so it's a similar thing of like, I will ruin your reputation. But in the book it is, I'll ruin your reputation by telling everybody you slept with my wife and had this affair. And it's like this big thing. Whereas in the movie he's like, I'll tell everybody you're gay, bisexual, whatever. Like, that's the implication. I do think this is an interesting change, and I definitely like it in a way because it's puts another bigotry on blast in a way that like. Which is homophobia in this instance, in a way that the book never really does outside of this. Because there is kind of this constant. Each of these stories kind of has a specific oppression that it is dealing with. So like in the Adam Ewing story, it is this slavery. Like, it is like old school new world slavery. Then in the. What's the one after that? Oh, this one there isn't really. It's more so just like this weird kind of relationship power dynamic between this old guy and him. So there isn't really like an explicit bigotry that's being like, addressed in that story. But then in like, the Luisa Ray one, there's specifically, there's the surprise. Like, there's like class things with like all the rich people and stuff. But there's also, like, it touches on sexism a lot with Louisa being like a woman in, like, the workplace and having to deal with all these sexist men and all that kind of stuff. And then like in the Stone Me one, obviously it's all about like the. A class struggle, but also just a struggle for humanity, like human rights, for people who are humans, but who are not recognized as humans. And so each of these stories has like these kind of struggles of oppression and oppressor and all that sort of thing. And so I like the idea of like making one of those stories that doesn't really have an explosion implicit that in it. Which is the. The Frobisher story. Adding this layer of like the oppressive system. And this is heterosexuality or like. Yeah, you know, the enforcement of heterosexuality. Which I thought was at least kind of interesting.
2:34:39
Speaker B: Yeah. And I. I will say, like, based on what you've described how the book differs from the movie, like adding on to that. Not that Frobisher having an affair with Jocasta. Jocasta wouldn't be detrimental to him at all. But historically men are kind of able to do that.
2:35:03
Speaker A: They explain that in the book. I would have to go read the whole section. The book does a good job of laying out all the ways that Vivian Ayers explains how he. Cause it's not just that. It's also that he knows that he has nowhere to go. He. He is research and knows that like his name is in bad repute back in England and that he has a bunch of debts that he had. Doesn't have. He knows all of this stuff. But on top of that, it's the thing with Jocasta because. Because Frobisher even says that he's like, well, you know, that's. I can't remember what he says that is addressed. I just don't remember exactly how it's addressed.
2:35:37
Speaker B: Fair enough.
2:35:38
Speaker A: Your point though, is mentioned in the book, like why that would be an issue. I just can't remember. Remember exactly what it is. And I don't want to go find it and try to read the whole section. I thought all the action scenes in the Neo Soul story are fun additions. Like, they're all pretty good. They're all movie additions. There's not really any of those action scenes for the most part. There's a couple scenes where some people shoot some people and stuff. But it's not remotely the action sequences that we get in the movie. I really like the scene in the movie where heju blows up the tunnel to kill all the cops.
2:36:11
Speaker B: Chasing them with the water, collapses it in. That was cool.
2:36:14
Speaker A: But then it also cuts directly to Luisa Ray's car underwater. Yeah, there's some Claire again, there's a lot of. For all of the movie loses from the book's structure. It does add a lot in different ways by having all of those moments interspersed with each other where you can do those really cool match cuts and thematic kind of through lines through these scenes. It's not that there's nothing cool there. It's just not as unique and cool as the book, in my opinion. This is a thing that the movie cuts that I'm kind of a fan of because I'm still not even sure that I. What I'm supposed to think about this in the book. At the end of her session with the archivist, Sanmi explains that this whole thing was fabricated by Unanimity, which. Unanimity is like the organization that enforces like the corpocracy or whatever, like the social order. Yes, they're like the secret police, I think, basically. And she says, and I don't know if we're supposed to believe like this is true or if this is just her suspicion. I don't know. But she explains to the archivist at the end that she thinks or knows one of the two, that this whole thing of her being like this ascended Fabricant who rebels and starts and like, does all this stuff was actually fabricated by Unanimity to make everyone more distrustful of Fabricants. She thinks, like, this whole thing is a false flag operation that she was thrust into and it was all like, filmed and recorded so that they can put out propaganda tapes and stuff of this Fabricant trying to destroy the social order and like, trying to take down the government. And, and, and she's like, oh yeah, this was all like, planned and like her evidence, she goes through her evidence and she's like, like, you know, like that scene where the. The guy shows up on the bridge and throws that girl over, she's like, didn't that seem a little on the nose? Like that explicit cruelty right in front of me. Didn't that seem a little, like, staged? Like we happen to be on this random bridge and this guy shows up and murders a child in front of me to, to. To lead my. To further radicalize me down this path. And so she's, she's. And again, I don't know if we're supposed to believe her or if this is just her perspective on it, but she thinks this has all been at least somewhat constructed and put together by the government in order to create a villain in. To lionize their power. But she also think is like, I'm fine with this because my message will still get out and it will still one day lead to the revolution that needs to happen. She's basically like, I think this was all constructed, but it's still gonna work. It's just not gonna work now, but it's gonna work one day. Because my message will get out. And we see that it does work because she becomes. Becomes the central figure of a religion down the line.
2:39:25
Speaker B: Which is.
2:39:25
Speaker A: Yeah. Which is what? We didn't really talk about that at all. But in the Sloosha storyline, Sunmi is their God.
2:39:32
Speaker B: Yeah.
2:39:32
Speaker A: Because. And it's all goes back to this where she was. Yeah. Which again is super fun. When you're reading the book, you're like, oh, that's. It's just so cool. I just think, oh, that's very neat. But I thought that whole thing where she's like, no, this was actually all like constructed and fake was just kind of weird, like last second, like not a rug pull. But I was just like, wait, what? So this is all not really real? I don't know. I just didn't. Wasn't huge on that. I enjoyed that. The movie just kind of got rid of that. I'm also kind of mixed on this, but I think I like Marilyn climbing the mountain specifically to try to send a distress signal to off world colonies, which is what happens in the movie. In the book, we never really explicitly find out why she wants to go up there. They just kind of look around the observatories and stuff that are up there there. And they're also not implied to me to be as advanced of technology. I guess they would be because it's not that old. But they climb mana Kia in the book. It's mana soul in the movie. Which I don't know if that's a real thing or not, but Mauna Kea is a real thing, which we have observatories on in Hawaii right now. There's also a lot of controversy with that about building observatories up there, which is indigenous holy site. It's complicated. But she wants to go up there to like see these things. But we never know what she's. We don't see her like send a signal or anything. They just go up there, look around and then they leave. And we don't really know why they went up there. So I kind of like the idea that they're going up there to try to like send a signal. Like, hey, we gotta get off this planet because there are colonies out off world. I don't know. I thought that was fine. It's a little cheesy. I don't know, I'm kind of mixed on it because it's also like the blue laser shooting out of the thing was dumb. Like we didn't need that. Whatever. I like that. In the book or in the movie, Zachary does get to save Katkin, which she's just gone in the mov. In the book, we don't. We don't know if she's dead or not.
2:41:27
Speaker B: She's just.
2:41:28
Speaker A: We don't see her ever again after the attack happens. But I like that he finds her and gets to save her. Thought that was nice. Oh, and I really like the visual of Marinem rising to save Zachary and Catkin from the exact spot. Spot where he didn't.
2:41:45
Speaker B: Yeah, I liked that too.
2:41:47
Speaker A: Like he hid there and didn't help, but she does. And I thought that was great. I thought that was really cool. And then my last note for better in the movie is that I. I don't mind. I actually quite like the scene where Adam gets home and reunites with Tilda and it's the same actors or Sanmi and heyju getting to reunite, but in the past it's. I like it. Makeup issues aside and like how that all looks aside and we haven't even gotten to that. Maybe we'll briefly touch on it in Odds and Ends. Like the. I don't have a lot to say about it because I just. I don't know, I have a little bit to say about it. We'll touch on it briefly now. Well, let's just talk about it now, briefly. A lot of people in this are playing different genders and different races than they are. It's not my past to give because I'm a straight white guy. Guy. Yeah, it's very clear that it is well intentioned and is in. In the service of a story. I think the thing to me that makes me give it a more of a pass than I would normally is that because of what the story is about, the essence of the story is the idea that all people are the same, are equal, all people are just people. And this idea that somebody in like the far future living in Korea who's a Korean person has the same sort of spirit or soul or essence or whatever as some white dude living in 1849. And that that spirit of that their desire to uplift the oppressed and save and overthrow oppressors is sort of this uniting ethos between not even ethos, but like this uniting this thing that unites them across races, across genders, across everything I think is saying something fairly profound and interesting that at least makes the usage of race swapping people and gender swapping people understandable and like an interesting creative choice. Even if maybe you shouldn't have done it. If that makes sense.
2:44:05
Speaker B: Yeah, no, I Agree. Yeah, maybe we shouldn't have done it. But like you kind of said, at least it has a purpose.
2:44:15
Speaker A: Yes, the purpose isn't. Oh, isn't it fun to see like at least maybe that's a little bit of it. Cause I think part of it is, oh, isn't it funny to see Hugo Weaving play a nurse lady? That is part of it, but I think another part of it is, well, he has the spirit of an oppressor and that manifests in all these different ways. He is always an oppressor in all of these different stories in some way I think in most of them. And by contrast, Tom Hanks, which I guess it does change around based on the different actors because Tom Hanks said sometimes is a good guy and sometimes he's a bad guy. But, but that idea of yeah, again, I don't. It's maybe, maybe there are better ways to do it probably. But I just think it's at least motivated by a good intention. If maybe not executed perfectly. I don't know. It's interesting. I would be interested to hear more from people who are of maybe the groups that.
2:45:16
Speaker B: That right.
2:45:18
Speaker A: Are subject to this because I mean, to be fair, there are, you know, they go every direction. We got men playing women, women playing men. We got Korean people playing white people, white people playing Korean. It's, it's all over the place. They just kind of loosey goosey, have everybody play whoever they want. But I don't know, it is, it is interesting. I would love to hear your guys feelings on it because I don't really have strong feelings one way or the other. I understand the criticisms of it, but I also understand a lot what they were going for. So. Yeah. All right, let's talk about a few things that the movie nailed. As I expected, Practically perfect in every way. A lot of stuff. Honestly, it's a pretty good adaptation, all things considered, and copies a lot of stuff from the book. As I mentioned earlier. Dr. Goose collecting teeth on the beach to sell for dentures. The line I mentioned earlier, as an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings and tricksy devices. They belong in the 1980s with an in postmodernism and chaos theory, which I thought was funny. This line which I thought is interesting is in the movie, which is don't let him say I killed myself for love. Six Smith. That would be too ridiculous. That's like one of the opening lines that Robert Frobisher says when he's like writing his suicide note. And in the book. They. They also, he says, don't let in the movie, he says, don't let him say I killed myself for love. 6 Smith that would be too ridiculous. Ridiculous. We both know in our hearts who is the soul love of my short bright life in the book. There's an extra line in the middle there that is cut out where he says, don't let him say I killed myself for love. 6 Smith that would be too ridiculous. I was infatuated by Eva Cromlnick for a blink of an eye. But we both know in our hearts. So they cut out the part about Eva because she's not in the movie at all. And so I don't really know who he's referring to in the movie when he says, don't let them say I killed myself for life love. Because I'm like, who would he be talking about? Because in the book it's because Eva very publicly rejects him and everybody knows about that. And so he's like, when they find me dead, don't. It wasn't Eva. Which it is kind of Eva. He's in denial about that in the book. But anyways, we mentioned earlier, but the birthmark showing up on everybody is obviously a thing in the book. The line where Rufus is writing or not Rufus, Robert is writing Rufus and says, Ayer's wife and I are lovers. Don't alarm yourself. Only in the carnal sentence. The line, finch wouldn't have been a critic if he didn't love unearned attention. That exact line is not in the book, but it's something very, very similar. Or it might even be that exact line. But he has a very like, snarky aside about critics and being assholes, which I thought was funny. Timothy is on the toilet when the Hoggins, like twins or whatever, triplets show up to shake him down Big Lebowski style. Which I thought was probably a reference to the Big Lebowski, but I thought that was was fun. When they go when una 939 shows San Mi the storage room with like the old stuff in it that or the stuff from outside of Papa songs, she says, you are inside a secret. That was from the book the three part Augurin where Zachary gets like those three prophetic messages from the Abis or whatever her name about, like things he should do. Those are very. That same thing happens in the book. They're slightly. The words slightly changed to better fit, but they're very, very similar and. And kind of allude to the same thing, including the final thing where we'll get to that in a second. Javi jumping into Luis's apartment from his apartment. Luisa does adopt this random little kid named Javier, who is like. Has a bad home life, so he hangs out at her apartment all the time. Is like. It's like an adopted son. Basically Catkin getting stung by the scorpion fish. The Prime Directive thing, which I mentioned earlier, the Aurora House escape is basically identical. Like, the way they pull that off, where they break out. It's basically identical. There's a slight change in the movie that I. That I like. This is. I like book one way. And I like parts of it better in the book and parts of it better in the movie. I like in the movie. They leave and Mr. Meeks comes in, out.
2:49:38
Speaker B: Yeah.
2:49:38
Speaker A: And they're like, oh, he did want to come. And so they go back and they get him. I thought that was really cute. Like, that's fun. In the book, there's this fun moment where they break out and they're driving the car down the road, and they're like, we did it. We made it out. And then they hear from the back seat. I know, I know. And they turn around. They're like, oh, shit, Mr. Meeks is in the car with us. He had, like, gotten into the car without them noticing or whatever, which is its own fun thing. But I really liked the camaraderie of them going back to get Mr. Meeks. Also specifically the scene where the Aurora House staff all show up at the Scottish pub and Mr. Meeks jumps on the bar and goes, I are the no true Scotsman in the house. It all. It's all identical. It is. Scotland is playing England in soccer at the moment.
2:50:22
Speaker B: Yeah.
2:50:23
Speaker A: So they're all riled up already anyways. And then all these English show up and he like, yeah. And they're gonna, like, arrest them and take him back to aurora House. But Mr. Meeks, who has only ever said, I know, I know. The whole book, jumps up and gives this rousing in defense of Scotland speech and gets them all to beat the shit out of the Aurora House people down to the detail of one of them gets their teeth knocked out and it lands in Timothy's beer, which happens in the movie.
2:50:49
Speaker B: Nice.
2:50:51
Speaker A: The true true that comes from the book, that's a thing that everybody references in this movie is like, kind of the meme that came from this movie is somebody saying something is the true true. Which it's only said one time in the book, I think, really. Whereas it's said a lot in the movie. There's One line where I think it's Zachary is talking about any like talking to Marinem about like what is true or whatever. And he says so the true true is different than the semen true. As I mentioned, the Kona attack and they kill all Zachary's people, take them captive or whatever. And the scene specifically where Zachary kills the drugged out sleeping Kona guy who's like in his home. That plays out very similarly in the book. It's explicitly stated that he, he took some drugs that they, they had like bliss weed or something. They had some sort of drugs. He's all like drugged out of his mind, like passed out. And he hears the he. He remembers the, the augurin telling him enemy sleeping, don't slit his throat or whatever and says now fuck that I'm killing this guy. San Mi and Heyju do have sex. Which is. Has one more great sex line in here. Hey. Or Sunmi thinks when she's reminiscing about them having sex, says stars of sweat on Haeju's back were his gift to me and I harvested them on my tongue, which I thought was funny. The scene of Sun Mi does get to spread her manifesto and everybody hears it. It's played. It's not quite as the dramatic like Raid. We don't see or hear about any of that. But it's a similar idea where she says it and then they do get attacked and killed, but we don't know exactly. I don't think it's that as like. I don't think it's like she's like giving the speech on live TV as they're like breaking down. I don't think it's that like immediate. I don't think it's that immediate, but it's a similar type of thing. And then finally the, the line your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops is the final line of the book and almost the final line of the movie. All right, we got a handful of odds and ends before the final verdict.
2:53:09
Speaker B: We talked about already some of the ethical issues with the makeups in this movie. I did want to say though that like from a technical perspective, I thought they. I thought they were pretty good.
2:53:23
Speaker A: I think they're a varying quality, but mostly pretty.
2:53:26
Speaker B: Mostly pretty good.
2:53:27
Speaker A: Yeah.
2:53:27
Speaker B: I did think Halle Berry looked pretty creepy with light eyes.
2:53:30
Speaker A: I thought the same thing about the actress who plays Tilda at the end.
2:53:33
Speaker B: Yeah, Felt kind of the, the light, the very light contacts were. I. I don't know if they went with exactly the right color.
2:53:41
Speaker A: Yeah. I also felt like they went a bit overkill with some of the aged eye folds on some of the characters. Specifically Hugh Grant's character, Denholm. Like, he's playing that old character guy. The. The, like saggy eyelids they gave him are way over the. I felt way over the top and just looked like a mask more than like. But for the most part, I agree. I thought the makeups were quite good, generally speaking. I thought the shot of. There's a lot of really gorgeous stuff in this movie. It's a well shot movie. But I. One shot in particular that I thought was pretty unique that I don't know if I'd seen in a movie and I thought played out really cool. Is that when Luis's car gets run off the bridge, we're like in the passenger seat looking out, looking at her out the driver's side window. And then like we go off and we like see her like falling through, like.
2:54:30
Speaker B: Yeah.
2:54:30
Speaker A: No gravity. And then the camera like slowly spins around and reveals and as it crashes into the water. I thought was really cool.
2:54:37
Speaker B: Yeah, it was a cool shot. Yeah, for sure. We didn't have a lot of odds and ends this time.
2:54:43
Speaker A: No, we didn't. I had too much to talk about in the.
2:54:46
Speaker B: Yeah. My last note was just, well, this has been eerily timely.
2:54:50
Speaker A: Yeah. That whole reading the book, like I said, the book is as. As like unabashedly progressive and anti capitalist and stuff that the movie is. The book is 10 times more. So. Yeah, not even 10 times more. So it's just there's more of it, like, there's more scenes, more discussion and more like there's just a lot of. More like musings on political violence.
2:55:15
Speaker B: Yeah, you can. And you can do that in a book. You can kind of muse and chew on things more in a book.
2:55:19
Speaker A: In a movie, it feels a little preachy. After a while, you're like, all right, all right. You got to kind of like get the plot moving. Whereas in the book you can really spend some time really going through it. And boy, does this book. It is like I said, expect this book to be banned in less than 10 years unless we fix things, which we should do. All right. Before the final verdict, I wanted to do you all, or wanted to remind you all that you could do us a favor by heading over to Facebook, Instagram, threads, goodread, Blue sky, any of those places interact. We'd love to hear what you have to say about Cloud Atlas and also do us a favor by heading over to Apple Podcast Spotify. Wherever you listen to our show, drop us a five star rating, write us a nice little review. We would appreciate that. If you'd really like to support us, you can head over to patreon.com thisfilmislit Support us there. Get access to bonus content at the $5 a month level and priority patron recommendations at the $15 a month level level. Which this one in fact was a patron request, was it not?
2:56:15
Speaker B: It was. It was a request from Cottonwood. Steve.
2:56:19
Speaker A: There you go. Thank you Steve. Despite my how long it took me to get through this book, I did really enjoy it. So all right, it's time for the final verdict.
2:56:29
Speaker B: Sentence passed, verdict after. That's stupid.
2:56:35
Speaker A: Cloud Atlas is one of the more unique books I've ever read. Its ingenious structure is initially a bit confusing, but once you figure out what the book is doing and why it's doing it, you can't help but be impressed by the way the novel weaves these stories together. It's a fascinating exploration of the cyclical nature of history and the ways in which oppression emerges is defeated, and re emerges in a slightly different but no less recognizable form. The novel is at times a tough read. I really struggled with the beginning of the Sluice's Crossing section, but if you let yourself buy into the world that the book is creating, it is more than worth the effort. The movie is a pretty damn good adaptation of this book. The general narrative beats are there, the characters are true to the novel, and it's well shot and well paced. But the choice to tell all six stories simultaneously while cutting back and forth between them just doesn't hold the same kind of convention breaking magic that the structure of the book does. I don't know if I've ever seen a movie with exactly the same structure as Cloud Atlas, but I've seen plenty of movies that were pretty similar and the magic trick of the book is just completely lost. It is fun as a companion piece to the book because you get some fun moments where the parts of the different stories that you noticed echoing each other while reading are edited directly together in the film to make the associations more clear. But honestly, even that kind of ruins the experience of reading the book. A big part of the enjoyment is catching all the little references and repeating moments motifs, and the movie just puts a blaring spotlight on them in a way that doesn't quite hold the same charm. It's a good movie, I really enjoyed it, but it just lacks some of the depth and ingenuity that make the novel truly something special. So for those reasons, I'm giving this one to the book. Katie, what's next?
2:58:17
Speaker B: Up next, we are getting into Halloween spooky season content. I don't know if this actually counts.
2:58:26
Speaker A: As a spooky movie, but it's spooky, just for different reasons.
2:58:29
Speaker B: But, yeah, but it's been on the list.
2:58:32
Speaker A: Nothing spookier than misogyny.
2:58:35
Speaker B: So we're gonna cover American Psycho novel by Brett Easton Ellis, and that is a 2000 film.
2:58:43
Speaker A: Yes, I am interested to find. Not interested. I'm excited to finally watch this. So I can. It can. It's in one of those movies that can cry off the. Like, I've never seen this list.
2:58:53
Speaker B: Yeah.
2:58:54
Speaker A: But I'm also interested to see how it feels in the light of something like, it's a very similar movie to something like Fight Club or whatever that has been misinterpreted and misconstrued and mis. You know, embraced by maybe the wrong people at times. And so I'm interested to see how it holds up as like, an actual. I think. Well, from what I've heard, it's a good movie. But anyways, we'll get into that all on the next episode. And on the next prequel, we will preview American Psycho and hear what you all had to say about Cloud Atlas. Until that time, guys, gals, my battery pals and everybody else, keep reading books, keep watching movies, and keep being awesome. Sam.