‘Our Hero, Balthazar’ and the cinema of growing up online

0:01Just give us our own friends.

0:08we're fighting for our lives here hey y 'all it's andrea dominick here with emily friedlander and you are listening to cujo a podcast about culture in the age of platforms so here at cujo we love ourselves a good topical film and our hero balthazar which is a new movie from oscar Boysen and Ricky Camilleri, has it all. MLMs, school shootings, the performance of the self on the internet, toxic masculinity, wealth inequality, designer drugs, catfishing, and more. Oscar and Ricky wrote the film during the internet-addled lockdown days of the pandemic, and it follows Balthazar, played excellently by Jaden Martell, who you might remember from the It franchise, who's a wealthy private school teen from New York City who becomes obsessed with Solomon, also played excellently by an almost unrecognizable Asa Butterfield, who is a much poorer boy in Texas who Balthazar fears is on the verge of doing a school shooting.

1:10It's a kind of crazy premise for a film, but it's also one of the best explorations we've seen about what happens when you bring the internet and social media into the more timeless story of the adolescent quest for identity and authenticity. Also, it's very, very, very funny. Our hero Balthazar is finishing up its theatrical run, but you can still watch it. It hits streaming on Apple TV on August 11th. So we're thrilled to have Oscar, who directed the film, and Ricky, who co-wrote and produced it alongside Oscar, on today's episode of Cujo. You might know Oscar from his work as a producer on 2010's indie classics like Francis Ha, Good Time, Uncut Gems, along with the show Chillin' Island, and Ricky from his work as a film commentator and talk show host for places like HuffPo and Verizon.

1:58But the pair go way back. They've known each other since meeting at Film Nerd Camp in their teens. We talked to them about how they came back together to write Balthazar in the wake of the pandemic, why they chose to frame the film, somewhat controversially, around the specter of a school shooting, and its incredibly sharp exploration of the complicated attentional dynamics of the internet. Plus, we get into the challenges that Oscar and Ricky faced making a dark topical indie satire amid peak risk aversion in Hollywood, the excellent music that shaped the tone of the film, including the song Vendetta by Ice Age, and how they drew inspiration from idiosyncratic coming-of-age films from the turn of the millennium like Bully.

2:39And if it's not playing near you, you can go ahead and pre-order Our Hero Balthazar on Apple TV now. A broken backbone, you're wasted on this side. Did you want to belong here? This ain't no place for a sightseer. Hey guys, welcome back. And we are here today with the writers and director of the excellent new film, Our Hero, Balthazar. Welcome to Kujo, Ricky Camilleri, and Oscar Voison. Happy to be here. Thank you. Thanks for having us. And producers, right? You're both producers. Yes. That's right. Okay, so I just want to kick things off talking about what I think is one of the best needle drops in visual media in a long time, which is, there's a tiny, tiny spoiler, but the use of Ice Age's song Vendetta at the end of the movie.

3:37It's used twice in the movie. Oh, it is used twice in the movie, right. It's in the bar scene. It is in the bar scene, yeah. I guess before Blind Dog, Cooley, and the boys come back for their encore. It's really the only criticism of the movie we get is, why is that Danish band playing in that Texas band? You're right. I remember now when I was watching it, I was like, oh, this is like one of those hipster dives. They're like playing Ice Age between the bands. Yeah. And you guys were saying that Elias from the band, he appeared at an event for the film the other night. How did that come together?

4:06Talk about picking the song and your relationship with him. Well, Ricky wrote a scene really early in the process that... First, first, first draft. Yeah. I wouldn't even call it a draft, right? It was just sort of like a rough vomit. Yes. But the song was right there in the script for a sort of party kind of hang, right? There was a whole sequence in the movie where Balthazar goes to Texas, and then he gets there and doesn't know what to do and doesn't know how to find Solomon. And so he's just sort of like, it would be like almost like in the movie when he's at the bus station, right? If Solomon wasn't there and Balthazar just kind of had to walk around Fort Worth, Texas.

4:47And he ends up sort of going into a 7-Eleven to ask. I forget, he's trying to orient himself. And he's noticed by this like teenage runaway who is like camped outside the 7-Eleven. And she basically cons him into getting a hotel room for the two of them. And then while she's there, she has sex with him. but she recognizes the power dynamics that balthazar is interested in and she pulls them out of him so really along with getting his credit card along with getting his credit card and then like kind of drugging him and making him pass out so all of her friends can come and party in the hotel room and i think vendetta was playing somewhere uh i think she danced for him and like a classic kind of like she goes about the like sort of like og ways of seduction that like a teenager would kind of maybe do, which is sort of like dancing for him and stuff.

5:37But Balthazar is too much of a weirdo to really know how to be turned on to that. I feel like I remember him like coming back to his hotel room and everybody's partying. Oh, right. She doesn't drug him. She comes back and everyone, he comes back and everyone's partying and they're all really mean to him. They're all like tough runaway kids and older kids and they see this rich kid and they've already got his hotel room and his credit card, which he doesn't know about. So they're just like shitting all over him and vaguely threatening him and making him feel like he's in a dangerous place. That's the first time we've talked about that whole lost sequence of the movie.

6:14You very much could imagine that happening, though, in there. It was pretty seamless, like an interlude. But I think because it was there, it became part of this playlist that was another thing we made early in the process because it felt like it was there in the spirit of the movie. and that playlist was like something that we would share with certain investors who I think are maybe more curious and certainly with actors and certain collaborators who are you want to give them something to kind of some songs that are actually in the script and then other ones that are more just there in spirit or songs that we talk about over the course of it.

6:51Do you guys want to hear a couple more songs that were on the playlist, none of which ended up in the movie, but this is what we would send to people. And this is what kind of inspired the script in the time. We had Tiny Children by The Teardrop Explodes. We had Cowboys in Cuba by Chris and Cozy. We had Lawman by Gilliband. We had I Want to Be a Cowboy by Boys Don't Cry, Vendetta. Peace on Earth, which is a choral song. A Daisy Chain for Satan, My Life with a Thrill Kill Cult. Shallow Ground by Corrosion of Conformity. Perfect Brain by emily allen i cry by the egyptian lover is blue sky black the song from fucking them all yeah yeah yeah so you guys just happened to pick vendetta like for that early scene that didn't end up making it into the movie that's where it appeared in the script it wasn't in the script the way that some songs were going into production and then we're putting together the score and we're with a very limited music budget, trying to figure out which songs we can license and add to the to the soundtrack in that way.

7:59And we tried a lot of different songs for the very end to try and just hold on to the feeling that the audience has there. And it was one of those situations where we like we tried a bunch of songs that weren't on the playlist. And then you kind of go around the world to get back to where you started, you know? Yeah. And there was always a sense of like how on the nose do you want the song to be right like do you want the song to be something that feels like it's basically throwing the themes of the movie back in your face like right up front you know so it would be like a pop song that everybody knows immediately and can immediately like the title appears in their head but then it would become about well one can we get the money for that and two do we want to do that and so i was trying to license it and i remember going through like the label and getting nowhere and then i just dm'd ilius and i was like hey man we don't have that much money but we do want to pay you something we're just trying to get this song i want to see if it's possible we have a very tight deadline and then like the next day i got an email from the label and they were like yeah let's go which always feels good and then he said he he said something that was really sweet for his intro that was the first time i met him that's the first you met him too right i met him in la earlier this year when he was doing a solo uh show but yeah we connected and especially his manager or their manager graham was a real fan of the movie so had been trying to get us together and the fact that we were doing a q a screening on sunday and they were playing and we were going to go to the show after we said hey do you want to introduce the movie and he was like sure i was like do you have something you want to do he's like no i'll just wing it and he definitely did the longest intro anyone's done for the film great but he said that he felt he was misled by the movie before he saw it because he thought it was going to be i think what a lot of people think the movie is going to be before they see it which is this sort of like pedantic lecture about mass shootings and young men versus uh what i think it is and and that i'm very much paraphrasing and butchering what he said and possibly also just sort of giving my own spin on what i hope he actually said and then he read a um he read lyrics from a song that hasn't come out yet that are is from the are from the perspective of a mass shooter which is cool failed failed mass shooter wow yeah he's just such a great performer he's so loose yeah i feel like in everything he does we just cast elias upcoming movie because that would be amazing.

10:32I mean, he's the camera sure likes him. He's really those eyes, right? Maybe don't have anything working on. Just planting the seed. Just saying, you know. So let's jump into the movie for people who haven't seen it. Can you just give a brief synopsis of what it's about? I mean, our hero Baltazar is about a wealthy teenager from New York City who he has a crush on this girl at his school is really in a gun control activism. So to impress her, he makes videos on social media where he performatively pleads for better gun laws and he cries about school shootings and he cries about how hard it is to be a teenager in America today.

11:15She rejects him. She's weirded out by these videos. But this troll starts sending him messages about the videos and begins this correspondence. And he becomes convinced this troll on the Internet is going to do the next school shooting in Texas. So he goes down there to try to befriend him in person and hopefully stop him from doing the shooting. But it's funny. All in hopes to still impress this girl. Yes. At least that's what he thinks, I would say, at the beginning. You know, 17-year-old guys. Where did this story and the characters come from? Was there something that sparked the initial inspiration for it?

11:52There was an FBI report in the wake of the Uvalde shooting that that shooter would message strangers all over the world, just trying to get in touch with people, trying to troll them, trying to get attention. And the morning of the shooting, he DMed a 13 year old girl in Germany that he had messaged with a few times, but not much. And he said, I just shot my grandmother in the face and I'm going to go shoot up my school. and she wrote back that sounds cool and when that report came out people tried to dox her online people started saying shouldn't this kid have done more even even some people in like mainstream uh i don't even it's not even really a thing anymore like mainstream media is actually like almost like not mainstream anymore but the people that we we have essentially we associate with being responsible reporters right or responsible news people were pontificating that like this generation, you know, shouldn't they have stepped up?

12:47Shouldn't this girl have said something? And one that felt like kind of a microcosm of not just what it feels like to be a young person right now, but to be a citizen right now where it's like you are constantly inundated with societal rot and the people who are actually responsible for it and could do something about it are putting it on your shoulders all the time. Like post about it, tell your friends do something do something and it's like well what do you want me to do i'm not i'm not in charge of any of this shit like you're just going to make me feel worse by when i post or do something and nothing happens and sort of if you have you know it's easy for me as a 42 year old man to like let that go but if you're a 13 14 15 year old kid your brain isn't fully formed yet so how is that changing your development then there was just the practical engine of a movie right like what if a kid got that message and tried to do something about it what would they do and it's like uh well they're not just going to go to the police like what if they tried to do something themselves then it's like well who would that kid be he'd have to be kind of deluded he'd have to be kind of alienated himself from his own environment and he'd also have to have the means to do something about it so that's sort of where the character ends up starting getting starts getting built off of right and you end up having this two-hander and he had a motive for doing it kind of like wanting to impress a girl i think he wants to i think he i think he wants to impress a girl but i think once he's there he's kind of caught up in the feeling of being there caught up in the feeling of being poor of having a gun you know having stakes in his life yeah yeah exactly having stakes which unfortunately are somebody else's stakes and not exactly his he's a he's a tourist right he wants the attention he wants to know what it feels like to stop a shooting.

14:34I think one of the problems that sometimes people have with the film, which was intentional by design, not for people to have problems with, but intentional on our part, is that we never really wanted Balthazar's motivation to be crystal clear, right? Because he's a 17-year-old boy. And I feel like when I was 17 years old, my motivations were all mixed up. I didn't know if it was because I wanted to get laid, because I wanted to impress friends because it was something my dad thought was cool when I was 13 and that was lingering in the back of my head. Like I didn't know. And so we held on to that for a while with him.

15:11We definitely give the girl reason. I feel like enough for the audience to feel motivated, but I've definitely heard people who say like, they're not really sure why he's doing it or what he's doing it. And, you know, I also always go back to taxi driver, which is that in Taxi Driver. The difference with Taxi Driver is that you have the voiceover narration to really sort of clue you into his alienation and his inconclusive sphere of thought. Whereas with Balthazar, you don't have that, right? You're sort of left with the vacant stare. Right, which is part of the point. Yeah. And what about Solomon, the other main character?

15:47Would you say that he has sort of this like swirl of motivations as well yeah i think it's it's at least clear at the beginning that we he wants money he wants a relationship with his father right and his father is seeming to present that to him by way of working in his pyramid scheme multi-level marketing company but you know the fact that that solomon actually wants a friend that he's lonely i think that's the you know that's the thing that both boys have in common. And that's probably more what the movie is about than school shootings or anything is loneliness and isolation. I think Solomon has what someone or a professional would refer to as like external and internal morbidities, right?

16:32Like several comorbidities that are warping and shaping his development and his central problem. The Culture Journalist is an independent project that relies on word of mouth and is funded entirely by listeners. If this pod had something meaningful to your life and you want to access everything we put out, please consider supporting our work by becoming a paid subscriber over at our Substack. Paid subscribers receive access to our Discord community, the Cujoplex, full access to bonus episodes, and more goodies. You can get it all for just five bucks a month over at theculturejournalist.substack.com.

17:12I was going to say, Speaking of formative events, when you're a teenager, when you're 17, the understanding is that you guys actually met when you were around 17, right? That's right. Tell us a little bit about your respective paths to film, both as individual filmmakers, but also as friends and collaborators. Or paths to this film. Yeah, you were like, you knew each other and then you came back together a lot later. Is that correct? We've always known each other. We met when we were 17 at Boston University's ITRIP, Institute for Television, Radio and Film Production. It was like a six week program over the course of the summer.

17:48For high school kids who wanted to make movies. Yeah. There was me, Oscar and a few other kids. But Oscar and I stayed in touch a little bit while you were in college. And then we both moved to New York at the same time. Yeah. And so we were always friends. But I think that just before the pandemic, we started flirting with writing stuff together. And then when the pandemic hit, we dove into it. Yeah. We both had sort of career changes around that time. And you had like a period there where you're thinking about doing graduate school, right? And so we just started writing something. The first thing that we wrote, we put, I mean, in my head, we put more work into it than our hero, Balthazar.

18:29And we could not, or I felt really like I couldn't get it going. I think in a way, because I'd been producing other movies, I sort of felt like I could sidestep from the size of the movies that I was producing into directing movies of the similar size. So that hurt. But it was a good it was a good failure in that it like forced me to take a step back and think about, hey, this is my first film. And most people don't don't get like a lot of resources on their first film. and what can I do to make sure that if we try it again and I rope Ricky into it, that I don't have to look at him again and be like, oh, this isn't happening.

19:13So part of the ethos when we got started was just there were a few supporters of the other movie, or really one in particular, the one that didn't happen. And I felt like they would probably ride with us on a different idea. And if that was all that we could get, then that's still money and it's enough to make a movie with it's too much to walk away from so even if it's not enough we're gonna do it and we just that was really important i think to approach it that way from the start so that we could just put a date on the board and go for it and when you don't have that much money you're like you're trying to talk people out of it basically and and you realize who's really on your team and who the right collaborators are instead of sort of telling yourself oh this dp is only going to work with me if they can have all their lights and the same team that they worked with on the big budget movie and then you start feeling like you need more in order to work with them whereas the collaborators on this movie especially the actors but all the department heads were just like i know you don't have much i'm in uh which is exactly what you want to hear and now we're now we're uh and we've written a bunch more things since then so it's been really great yeah and we're writing something now about the trauma industrial complex oh really did you read katherine lou's book do you know her i've heard i've heard her um i heard her podcast yeah she just wrote a book on that very topic so you might really check it out that's a podcast i listened to twice like as soon as i was done with it her specific interview on doom scroll oh yeah we had her on once to talk about the professional her book on the professional managerial class but i think that she has written a new book yeah we also just had josh on is the professional managerial class going away with ai is that the fear right because professional managerial classes is essentially white collar workers or people who ascribe to be white collar workers right yeah and have email jobs and they're sort of like i guess their role in society is to sort of discipline the proletariat on behalf of capital they're in this sort of intermediary role um is it going away that's a big question of debate right whether we're in the midst of that particular soup right now yeah yeah we're in the midst of figuring that out i just think of me i just think of the word managerial and i feel like the one thing that ai ai isn't actually good at the craft right they're not actually good at like write a script and it's going to write a script or write a song and it's going to write a real song or do do do the thing that somebody with actual talent like puts themselves into you can feel the fakeness there whereas like managing my email or my calendar or something or they're being an executive assistant and i don't want those jobs to go away for people people need to work it seems like that's the thing that it can actually organizing risk finance stuff, things.

22:14I think the latest, like the Silicon Valley take, the latest one is that actually the artists will be fine and it's the coders who are in trouble. And artists will be able to use these tools to do more stuff or something. Like they will have the advantage. Right. Eat their own. I don't know if I mean I'd be curious like if you're if your manager was an AI oh yeah and people skills will be and that people skills will actually be more valued yeah yeah like I would tell an AI I mean I I haven't worked for a for like a big company in a while but a manager is supposed to hold everybody accountable and make sure like we all hit our goals right that's imagine getting set down yeah sat down and be like ricky you still haven't finished the assignment you know you get sat down by a person it's like did you tell gene or ai chatbot to fuck off yeah right yeah you know you can't do that gene comes and tells me no i mean when i when i remember it was one of the first ones he did but i when i remember listening to that that podcast i feel like certainly that class in film is disappearing right there used to be a lot of jobs the pmc type jobs at studios where people could this is kind of what i remember katherine saying is like people who can kind of tell themselves they're doing pretty well they're better than the the people below them you know there's a good amount of security there probably a bit of mobility you can say you know that you're you can go to a cocktail party and talk about your job and feel good about it like those jobs are definitely falling off a cliff when it comes to making movies and and and television what what what would like the job title be for that i think like um the people who are under like the head of film at a at a production company or a studio i never even like when we got out of college the idea that you could go and work at a company in Hollywood or something, like a production company, where you got benefits and security, like a fixed income, you could kind of plan a life around.

24:32I never even thought that was a possibility. I just figured like those jobs go to people who are in the know, you know, or have the family connections where like people are kind of swapping favors around. And I think that's still kind of the case. And I get it now that I'm older, like why you would do that. But But I think less and less like nowadays, unless you have a really good connect, I think you're maybe working at an agency is the only sort of entry level where you have those things in entertainment. Yeah, that makes sense. Was there a point like we come from media? I know, Ricky, you worked in like media.

25:09Yeah. Was there also like a point where like there was a gravy train at all in the 2010s? Absolutely. Was that in cinema as well? I don't know. oh I don't know about that there are a lot of like media jobs for filmmakers probably like people pivoting to video and stuff I definitely felt the like like what YouTube meant to our generation which was that if you wanted to direct a commercial and you're like 10 5 10 years older than me you probably wouldn't have gotten that opportunity until you were like 35 you know whereas everybody my age, you could get a job working on like somebody like Nike or Converse.

25:49They were hiring young, young kids to make cheap, cheap web commercials so that they would have content for YouTube. And suddenly you're a director with a reel of recognizable brands. That was something very new for us. So but that's mostly rewarding freelancers, you know. And yeah, so I think there was a bit of that but it was for me at least it didn't feel like it was in the making movies making scripted entertainment that makes sense i mean i got a media job and well my first job in 2007 was a media job that was pre-financial meltdown right the financial meltdown happened a lot of those media jobs went away and then when the administration was like zero percent interest rates all those media jobs came back in like 2011 and i got a pretty nice one in 2012 that i had till the pandemic basically oh wow versions of it until the pandemic and we shot scripted stuff and it was all video and it was all this idea that like it would people would like youtube hadn't hadn't eaten everyone's lunch yet so there was the sense that like you could have a new video player bright cove or some video player like that right and you could gear all your audience on whatever sort of high traffic website you have towards your own video.

27:07But eventually everybody just pivoted to YouTube, right? Like they're all using YouTube. Yeah. And Oscar, you actually, you kind of got your start in the wild west days of YouTube a little, right? Yeah. I mean, I, my first job in New York, well, once I decided to live here permanently was with Casey and Van Neistat and Casey in particular was one of the first guys on YouTube. I still get recognized as Oscar from Casey's vlog. Those kids did the other night. Yeah. Yeah. Which is someone who's always had like one foot in internet filmmaking and one foot in movie theater movies. It's interesting because you at least being 90s kids, you grow up with an idea of like the movies and movie stars and um it means something to us right but if you if you know Casey and you've like been in his vlogs the the reach of what he's done is so much bigger than any actor I've ever worked with you know um yeah it's pretty pretty amazing in that respect we touched on this a little bit earlier but so one of the you know the central theme or one of the central themes of the movie is attention and getting attention on the internet and like what the utility of attention is uh talk a little bit about like how how does attention function differently for the two characters especially given they're two very different locations and stations in life well one character is seeking attention by presenting himself as the victim of society's ills even though he is more likely as he gets older to be one that is perpetrating society's ills in whatever career he he ends up getting that is balthazar and then there is solomon who wants to present himself get attention for being the perpetrator bad guy the scary bad guy of society's ills and i think that has to do with their different takes on masculinity and self-worth and purpose in the uh attention economy you know yeah you see it even with balthazar's you know i just i think in another movie balthazar would have had a moment where he says my mom is hanging out with a liberal politician i just want to impress her you know but we just sort of present that she's doing that and then he's doing the thing right and he could be doing it to impress his mother, to get attention away from the Hakeem Atkins, not the other one, the Hakeem character.

29:44So that's what he's doing. That's what he thinks a man kind of does. Whereas Solomon's, what he's presented in terms of his role models for manhood are his father who does MMA and sells supplements and is seemingly like a pretty mean man. Used to do porn. Used to do pornography. Yeah. Yeah. And we started writing in 2022 and that like the hangover of the pandemic was still very much in the consciousness. And I those years in particular, when we were all inside and I think, you know, we were both just thinking a lot about or feeling really bad for the kids who are spending those like early teenage formative birthdays like inside alone, you know, at that age when you're really you're looking for you're trying to figure out who you are.

30:32and you're looking for examples, you're looking for culture, you're exploring identities. And there was a big thing that for us, as we were writing the script that we held on to, which is that I remember, and I think Oscar remembers when you're 17, 18, 19 years old, you're really searching for authenticity. Without knowing it, you're trying to form your identity. What feels real to you? What feels original? And you hear teens use those words a lot of the time, right? Like, oh, that was so raw. That was authentic. And it's a real thing that they're searching for to form who they are. But how can you find that when everything that is being presented to you is immediately sort of mentally focused tested by everybody that's presenting it like online life is so presented to be authentic while completely inauthentic at every turn.

31:26And so we've thought a lot about that for a young person. How can you be sincere? How can you be authentic when your entire life is insincerity and inauthenticity because you are only experienced emotions under you're only experiencing things first as something that you can reflect back to other people you know and that's absolutely attention right it's just how you win the more performative the better a performance it is the more attention you win and increasingly we have just more and more examples of it really doesn't matter it doesn't matter if people get hurt. It doesn't matter if you lie.

32:00It doesn't matter if you're exposed. It's just about the attention that you're getting. Yeah. I want to have you guys talk a little more about the choice just to frame the film around the specter of a school shooting. I mean, a school shooting among many things is, you know, an extreme attention, extreme attentional event. There's some like, I feel like there's been some like discourse that it's like the types of murders that occur in a society or the types of violence that occur in a society are mediated by media like in the past we had serial killers because of right how the newspaper is released day to day or like it was like a type of violence that like that's interesting yeah and obviously like with the school shooting or any kind of mass media yeah do you feel like serial killers serial killers are kind of like the serial killer births media right like media doesn't necessarily birthed the serial killer.

32:55I feel like you could go back in history and you could just find serial killers, but they weren't necessarily talked about as much or they weren't presented in the way that modern tabloid media ended up being able to present them. Right. Like a serial killing is such a sexually driven act of power. You know, it's usually men. I mean, it's not even usually it's men, like of a certain age, and they're predominantly almost always killing women, usually women, marginalized women who they can probably get away with doing it to. But it's a sexually driven act, act of power. And you could say that a mass shooting is that as well.

33:33But a mass shooting, especially a school shooting, is so often with the intention of getting the attention of the media. You could say the Zodiac killer kind of did that. But there's also a lot of questions about whether or not the Zodiac killer was really one guy or it was multiple people who were playing the media a little bit. But like I think of someone like when I think of a serial killer, you know, I think of like John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, like Richard Ramirez, like the real classic serial killers. They weren't necessarily doing it for media attention. They were doing it because they had sexual murderous compulsions that the media then globbed onto and turned into a sensational story.

34:13And this sort of like linear thing that people are following in the news like this happened then this happened then this happened then this happened yeah like it just seems like a rarity to me that a serial killer was like i'll kill this person and that'll get in the news then i'll kill this woman and that'll get in the news too it just seems sort of like a byproduct of their sexual even though the the gilgo beach killer right is it gilgo beach the long beach like he didn't necessarily want to be in the media but what he did do which was then sensationalistic and was in the media was that he started using the cell phones of the girls that he called to call their family to fucking taunt them right that is such a sick display of power compulsions that i think is the story and the way the media ends up using it as like a byproduct of what he would have been doing no matter what whereas i think you could argue school shootings i don't know if you can disconnect the two that makes me what you're saying no no no that's a fair point or you could maybe the preponderance of serial killers in the 1970s maybe went on to like birth a next gen that was a little bit more tied closely to the media attention because we did see some of some of them like you know like the summer of sam killer and you know berkowitz like sent letters to the news like the zodiac yeah exactly yeah yeah our original question was yeah what were you interested in about this is like the specter of this looming over the film or like yeah what yeah like the school shooting as this extreme attentional event or like a nihilistic nadir of what the attention economy represents?

35:43I mean, one thing that's that was interesting to us, or I think to us, but at least to me, was like back to that question of looking for culture, right? When you're coming of age, and you're trying to figure out who you are, and you're sort of trying on different identities. And if everything's online, that's the only place to look, a lot of people are going to be led to these very extreme places, right? And as violence, especially mass shootings and even assassinations are memefied, they almost become like a performance in themselves, right? And I always felt like the two boys are kind of looking for like, what's my role in that performance, in that meme?

36:25And what does it say about our society that Balthazar sees himself as the victim and Solomon sees himself as the psycho right or at least like that's what they feel inclined to offer to the internet and perform on social media it was crazy how like one of the opening scenes is the drill i don't know how you call it the consultants that baltice fancy private school brings in yeah incredibly funny by the way just like so hilariously written like so so dark of course yes and then the great danny mccarthy yeah the actor who plays gore and it's like very clear that to these kids who are in new york like they personally don't feel any threat of this happening right right because it doesn't happen as much in new york i guess i don't know no not not at all i mean not sort of like random acts of violence mass shootings there's shootings in new york my partner was teaching at a school on the upper east side and there was a shooting and they had to do a lockdown and uh she was pregnant at the time and i got a text from her that's like we're locked down there's a shooting and it was like so terrifying because she didn't know what the shooting was so you immediately imagine some fucking psycho stalking around the school while everyone's locked down what it ended up being was like a kid was shot by another kid a block away and the kid that was shot like ran into the school to go to the nurse which is sad in and of itself but it's not the same thing right and new york city has some of the strictest gun laws in the country whereas upstate you know other it's the terrible uh shooting in buffalo that was pretty recent yeah the the grocery store right yeah we should also add that for people who haven't seen the film it's not just the school like hosting like a regular unfortunately like a kind of regular uh drill for a mass shooting event that most schools might have but it's like a privatized firm that exists solely to bring these trainings to schools and the guy is even says like in his little speech during the class assembly like you guys are the last line of defense you know and you just think about the whole like industrial complex like built around school shootings which leads to then maybe like one of the darkest meet cutes i've ever seen in that movie that sets the whole thing off yeah when we were there was a screening we did early on after the movie was released and a girl that was at the theater said that we because when we wrote it we thought it was like you know an exaggerated step right like we were taking it into a satirical place it's the one really one of the moments of the movie where I feel like we're doing kind of like classic satire yeah and then we we met this girl and she was like oh we did that all the theater kids would have to dress up as the bodies or have to play the part of a shooter and all this thing like it was a real I just couldn't imagine that that was a real thing students and parents and teachers thought was responsible but uh I guess in some parts of the country they do If you like what you're hearing on this episode, there's a place where you can join the conversation.

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40:02That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. how does the specter of the mass shooting of a potential mass shooting function differently for the two lead characters and like why frame the movie around this idea of being a hero i think earlier it's the idea of not necessarily a hero but like victim versus perpetrator right balthazar asked can i be a victim too right i think a victim in the attention economy is the same thing as a hero, right? You're the hero of your story. If you're a victim, you're a survivor, you're telling your truth, right? You almost get presented more as a hero than like a guy in Idaho who just stopped a mass shooting, right?