Episode 21: The Trash Stratum - Part 2

The writings of underground filmmaker Jack Smith serve as a starting point for Phil and JF's second tour of the trash stratum. In their wanderings, they will uncover such moldy jewels as the 1944 film Cobra Woman, the exploitation flick She-Devils on Wheels, and (wonder of wonders) Hitchcock's Vertigo. The emergent focus of the conversation is the dichotomy of passionate commitment and ironic perspective, attitudes that largely determine whether a given object will turn out to appear as a negligible piece of garbage... or the Holy Grail. By the end, our hosts realize that even their own personal trash strata may give off shimmers of the divine.

Jack Smith, Flaming Creatures
Robert Siodmak (director), Cobra Woman (1944)
Jack Smith, "The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez"
Roger Scruton, English philosopher
Mystery Science Theater 3000 (TV series)
Kenneth Burke, American literary theorist
Alfred Hitchcock (director), Vertigo (1958)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
Charles Ludlam's Theater of the Ridiculous
Mel Brooks (director), High Anxiety (1977)
"Ironic Porn Purchase Leads to Unironic Ejaculation", The Onion (1999)
James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim"
Herschell Gordon Louis (director), She-Devils on Wheels
André Bazin, What is Cinema?
Erik Davis, "The Alchemy of Trash"
David Lynch, Mulholland Drive
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Phil Ford, "Birth of the Weird"