Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and The New Horror Film w/ Joshua Gooch

[00:00:00] So I wrote about the witch in this book and I watched interviews with Eggers from the release and already I was kind of pissed at the way he would talk but his whole conceit for the witch is that he's just representing how people thought at the time and one of the problems with that film is the way that he represents how people thought at the time is there are no Native Americans and the land's just there for you to take and you're like I don't know if that's you representing what the settlers thought or that's just what you think.

[00:01:54] What's up y'all welcome back to Struggle Session I'm your host Leslie Lee III thank you so much for joining us today we have an amazing episode I talked with writer Joshua Gooch about his new book Capitalism Hates You Marxism and The New Horror if you're looking for a deep dive into some of the best new horror flicks you're gonna love this one but before we get started I want to thank everyone for their great feedback on our Sinners crossover episode with

[00:02:22] Bad Faith and the bad faith y'all know I love talking with Brie any chance I get Josh a joy as always great film to talk about had a really good time if you haven't listened to it please do so and speaking of crossovers if you have not listened to the creepy podcast creep away camp where our storytellers are sitting around a cap fire telling each other horror stories in the bayou of Louisiana

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[00:04:14] i'll be talking with will sloan oh yeah the will sloan about his new book ed wood made in hollywood usa yes we're talking about the director who was once called the worst director in all of hollywood but will has a completely different new fresh take can't wait to hear it the website is sush.show send us an email or voicemail

[00:04:43] about what you think about sinners or this episode or anything else to the struggle session at gmail.com and also just in case i missed anyone thank you to everyone who shared and supported my gofundme i really appreciate it your help means the world i'm trying to beat this long covet thing you see what we're doing we're flashing up the show we're doing video now i'm a da vinci pro okay they know me down there at da vinci we're doing it

[00:05:10] we're moving forward we're pushing forward and i couldn't do it without your help and without your support so i want to thank you so much for that but that's enough pre-ramble let's talk some scary movies all right joshua welcome to the show how's it going going great thanks for having me thank you so much for coming on thank you so much for this book it's really interesting

[00:05:32] really fascinating capitalism hates you marxism and the new horror film joshua why'd you write this book why now why now horror has changed dramatically over the last decade 15 years we've got a new cycle of horror that's being it's driven as a production cycle right so instead of thinking as genre is a very static thing we saw a massive growth in the kinds of films that are being made and the kinds of people who are allowed

[00:06:01] to make them which has really changed what the genre looks like and i think forces us to re-examine horror and what we think we know about horror and also to in the process then rethink what we know about marxist theory all right so tell me a little bit more what specifically you think has changed you know from the 80s to the 90s to the aughts to the teens was there horror i feel like i don't remember it

[00:06:25] i mean there well so you've got this weird movement i would say in the aughts right where you have what we have i think right now is a production cycle of of art horror right which is more or less where i sort of focused my attention and that was because we we've just lived through this long process of horror becoming respectable so i can get mass release it can be it's an imax right or it's coming back to imax this is all yes that's new um in a way that it wasn't before and horror has long tried to be

[00:06:55] respectable in that way to pull in more money um so part of it was thinking through how did that happen and why did that happen and a lot of it comes down to how horror has drawn in art horror art cinema melodrama and the the concerns of different constituencies um if you look at older versions of horror and especially older film criticism on horror it's very much about young white dudes

[00:07:23] wanting to see topless women and stab them and that's sort of the way that it was seen as a very masochistic misogynist sort of genre and that's not all that horror has ever been right it's just the way that the slasher in particular became code for all of horror now we see that we have really different things happening and that starts with you know i mean we get weird and go all the way back to von trier and antichrist but i don't think we need to but you know like that's you think about like

[00:07:53] the early the early aughts like that sort of art horror is happening and then you get the babadook which makes a fair amount of money for very little cost and suddenly oh wait wait we can do a lot of these and that builds over a series of this is how a24 gets big but then it opens up all these different kinds of horror that can be made that becomes marketable and budgetable and then who gets to make it because there's more money coming in and more opportunities for distribution and suddenly

[00:08:22] you've got like a really probably the only vibrant film genre i think going right now everyone else everything else is really dead but lots of people are making and doing interesting things in horror now in a way that you're just not seeing like film noir western these are dead genres um horror is active in a way that nothing else is right now all right that's all well and good what the hell does a

[00:08:49] marxist care about horror well i mean so here's the thing marxist literary criticism is and cultural criticism has been pretty stayed it's been pretty white it's been pretty focused on some very limited ideas and when you think about like what marxism needs to do which is to account for uh experiences of people of color the experiences of women the crises of care the crises of the

[00:09:18] biosphere you have to actually expand what marxism does and when you look at what horror does and what it represents right i mean the way that i treat horror in the book is all about our shared recognition of what scares us right so that's what makes horror pleasurable you go you're like that's fucking scary uh and then the rest of the people in the theater say that's fucking scary well suddenly you have a shared sort of consensus of experience like these are bad things so horror has a

[00:09:46] way of bringing you together that doesn't have a particular politics right but it means that you recognize that you have shared problems marxism lets us talk about those things if we use it properly by reaching out and then drawing in things like social reproduction theory black marxism eco-socialism we suddenly can make a more interesting and full account of marxism out of it so i think horror actually

[00:10:10] needs marxism to explain some things but marxism really needs horror to make it the kind of cultural criticism it needs to be all right so let's get into the book the chapters and i love these titles work hates you love hates you nature hates you the neighbor hates you commodities hate you the family hates you feelings hate you you're going through all the different you know kind of really visceral

[00:10:38] ways that you can categorize modern horror and you tie each of these to specific marxist ideas so uh you know is your book please whether to some of the more interesting things i only read half the titles you have to get the whole book and i highly recommend you do to get the full to each the breakdown but we're going to give you a little taste a little snack a little preview here

[00:11:02] so like each one of those chapters is about working through a particular theory but trying to link it to different sub-genres right so we've got chapters on anti-work horror i've got feminist anti-capitalist horror um one of my favorite ones is psychedelic fungal horror which is okay comes out of you know nature hating you like the the idea of that there's each one of these is organized around a kind of

[00:11:26] common sense right so for that chapter the common sense is we're told that our consumption is what's causing climate change you're like well it's our consumption is structured around what capitalism produces and how it produces it and how it forces us to buy things just to get through the world right so it's not just your consumption it's a whole social system it displaces that onto like don't

[00:11:50] you feel bad what's your carbon footprint like fuck your carbon footprint like what's going on with the production of cars how does that change how we actually get around those things get displaced and so psychedelic fungal horror gives us a way to think through that tension between what's actually happening out in the world that's scary and that we don't have control over and the things that are

[00:12:14] within our control and it you see in films like uh gaia which is really cool south african uh horror very much uh the last of us influenced if you want to think about like fungal people coming out of the woods and going ooh at you cordyceps virus yes and so you know the zombie ant thing is there's a lot of things with with the zombie ant stuff but for this particular film it does a ton visually with

[00:12:44] this very small and the very big right to try and give you a sense of climate change is something that happens at a very tiny level that's not human and at very large levels beyond the human so like the opening of the film you've got this drone shot that takes you over the forest canopy and then it'll flip and invert to give you a sense that something has gone wrong inside this world right but that overview of the forest canopy gets paired with an overview later on of one of the characters

[00:13:13] bodies has become completely colonized by fungus right and there's this clear linkage between what's happening in this large world to what's happening to your human body to try and give you a sense of what climate change means for humanity and that that kind of movement visually is important for us to just think about how we represent climate change to ourselves and what it i gaia that film that's one

[00:13:39] you introduced me to and i it's on tubi and it's amazing it's a amazing film everyone should check it out very disturbing haunting beautiful in its own way like don't let the last of us compare it's much better than the last of us tv show i would highly recommend it over that it's it's just that when people saw it and i think it came out there were a number of p of just people online going that's the same idea but

[00:14:06] that's because horror shares lots of ideas right it just keeps transmitting and even the the distributor of gaia also the same year released in the earth which is another fungal horror it's also got the same character breakdown like it has a lot of the same elements but a very different film and also good and worth checking out all right so let's talk about anti-work horror all right so anti-work horror is

[00:14:33] generally the way that i've set it up in the book is horror that's very specifically opposed to work right um but the way that it represents it and my example here is joe lynch's 2017 film mayhem which i'm thinking people might have seen it's definitely it was very prominent on shutter if you ever see the shutter banner right it was always like right in the middle there every time you log on he was right there steven yune yep just staring you down and the conceits something you would recognize from from

[00:15:03] any number of of horror films where there's a virus that causes rage and violence and so on and so forth right but the the specificity specificity of this film is that it's inside a law firm the lawyers get infected and then they're also the same law firm that made it legal for you to do whatever when you're infected because you you aren't responsible for for it right so that's that's the sort of overarching

[00:15:33] conceit but then it just means that well if you're infected you can just kill your way to the top right and that's just what he does and it's it's but it's paired in the film then with this other plot of um a woman who needs to who is having her house foreclosed on it's a very post 2008 film right and and he's put in the position of telling her well yeah i can't do anything about it i know it's wrong what are you going to do and so the pair of them are killing their way to the top so she can get her house back he gets control of the firm blah blah blah and this doesn't sound like necessarily

[00:16:02] an anti-work piece but its whole thing is work sucks you should kill your boss and i mean there are other versions of that like dracula has has a lot of like work sucks you should kill your boss sort of woven through a lot of the adaptations but for this particular film it shows how much that especially in contemporary we'll say like intellectual work like service work it's all about figuring out the rules and then manipulating the rules and that's all he's doing the whole time oh i i can get

[00:16:31] away with killing these people because i have this excuse and this legal pretext but the whole idea of the film is like you're you're infected and you can't control your rage you never see anyone like i can't control my rage it's always like what if we have a deal and then i don't know that's i don't like this deal what if i kill you instead like that's not that's not uncontrollable rage that's like i'm figuring out what i can do cynically to climb up the ladder and that's very much how the film presents

[00:16:59] itself so when you see what i was trying to draw out from these films is that anti-work tends to be a way that well initially i think in wider culture see it as this must be resistant but it's not necessarily resistant right i mean if you work in any kind of physical labor job it sucks and you go to work and like fuck this job and like you do it and then you leave and you're like i'm not thinking

[00:17:23] about it saying fuck this job very reasonable reaction it's not the same thing as being directly opposed to work right or change saying like we need to get rid of work and so trying to break those things apart from here are the rules i'm going to manipulate them as best i can to what's work making me do why do i have to work what can i do so that i don't have to work is a very different kind of

[00:17:49] question let me ask you this is something we hadn't prepared for but one of the tv shows that people are talking about is technically kind of an anti-work horror severance have you seen it what do you think of it i mean sever i got through the first episode of season one and then i just i went but but it's it's because it felt so intensely charlie kaufman to me that i have a i have this theory that charlie kaufman can do charlie kaufman and everyone else who does charlie kaufman doesn't

[00:18:19] know where it's going to go so it felt like they didn't have a direction i know my my partner has been watching she got through all through season two and she's like man you made the right choice to leap out after the first episode i'm like i told you it wasn't going anywhere good uh i've i've i keep reading about it but i know exactly that's so funny that's basically my exact experience i think i've watched a couple more half episodes while my partner has watched the whole thing and been like

[00:18:47] oh no you're you're you're not anything but but i thought what i found interesting i think i even think a lot of fans will agree with this is like people like it because it's something to talk about week to week and it's coming out and that's kind of is if the show is just okay like that's a kind of enough well and it puts you in the mindset of work is bad and there's a split between my work life and my home life which is true but it doesn't necessarily have i mean and this is the thing about

[00:19:16] any kind of horror it doesn't have to have a solution but it should have i feel like a point of view and everything i've read about season two was that people got mad because it clearly didn't have a point of view and it kind of went down this path of it's a cult maybe it's better to have this divided self maybe work is okay maybe i should celebrate my work life and my special workness and you're like yeah man i mean that's where it was always going to go because you've got these two character kinds of characters it's always going to be rooting for these two different

[00:19:47] competing versions of the character and then you're going to wind up being like well maybe you should love your work maybe works great you're like no no no no no no don't do that yeah i talk a lot about on the show right like the soap operification of any series that goes on for a certain amount of time because it doesn't matter whether you start off episode one the main villain is like an evil eugenicist by season seven he's gonna have a romantic relationship with one of the protagonists

[00:20:15] it's just there's nothing there's whose father he killed you know exactly there's no place for it to go it's the same problem that you know pro wrestling has as well you know like any kind of storytelling but that's why uh horror stories can horror movies and horror films i think can be so powerful and poignant because a lot of them they end they end them with the brutal death of all the characters in the

[00:20:40] movie sometime okay so have you seen uh this is this we didn't talk about this one before but a banquet it's one of these you know manage your feeling horrors but it's it just is extremely dark and the end it's it's working out of that same melodramatic structure right so it's within the family it seems like there's a variety of problems within the family and these things are being repeated at different generational levels and then the end just blasts the whole thing away and it's like nope

[00:21:09] nope you're fucked and that's i mean that is what i like about horror is that even when it especially in these more the ones that are extremely elevated and using melodrama in the woman's film they are often leading you down that road and the best ones i feel like just yank the rug out right from under you and they say like wouldn't you love this this way of thinking that will make you feel better and it's like you don't get it and there's no solution to it right so like jane schoenbrun's

[00:21:38] we're all going to the world's fair or hatching right i mean these these films were just it it wants you to take that melodramatic plot and follow it to its natural conclusion and then just stabs you right in the heart all right so let's you mentioned the family so one of the chapters is about the family genre which i think has been very popular when you look at film like hereditary you already mentioned baba duke

[00:22:02] several of the films that have brought this era of horror to prominence have been about the horror of the modern family i'm wearing the twin peaks t-shirt uh right now which you know kind of a progenitor of a lot of this stuff so tell me about that so yeah the i mean elevated horror is interesting because it it's if you look at the baba duke the baba duke is doing the woman's film and

[00:22:27] it's doing melodrama and it's bringing them together um please please explain what the woman's film for non-academics just to be clear yes yes yes so the woman's film the woman's film just means a film that is it's got a female main character and it's focused on historically the concerns of women in society at that point in time right so it's like there it starts in the 1940s and they were called weepies so like specifically made for women to go and then they would be orchestrated to make them cry

[00:22:57] about like you do all you do all you can and you work as hard as you can and then you give it all up because that's what your daughter needs and don't you feel sad at the end but also good that's that's a that's a 40s woman film and the i do want to pause right here just to mention a vivid memory of cinema going that i have as far as weeping at the theater goes when the first time i went to the movies in

[00:23:20] japan i was seeing a samurai drama film and during the sad scenes everyone in the theater cries together everyone they pull out to everyone cries together during the sad parts and the scene i asked my friend who was japanese like why why everybody cries like oh just because it's so sad for everyone to see he

[00:23:43] had to give up his you know life because you know the honor etc etc but like it was a really interesting shared experience so it's kind of you know like that term weepies kind of makes it feel but if you were actually there you probably got something out of it like i mean emotion is a shared experience and so like the film tries to get it out of you through these i mean just just close-ups of faces will do it but having it happen all around you is really powerful it's why i think going to horror films

[00:24:13] in theaters is so great right when it really goes it really goes um so like the babadook takes that idea of the woman's film and it i mean that's how it's sort of initially set up it's focused on our main character it follows her problem loss of her husband her grief her inability to find time to take care of her grief troubles she has raising her child alone in a low-paying job all these things

[00:24:38] kind of you know ramify and build up that could be just a basic melodrama and they add to it this supernatural element of the babadook which is just literally a metaphor for grief right and this is the thing that makes people mad about elevated horror now you're just always looking at and saying where's the metaphor for grief but the babadook does it first and does it very well and how she learns to manage that set of feelings is about making space for i think being a woman and

[00:25:08] thinking about your needs as a human being in relationship to being a parent and how those things are constantly at odds so that is really a sort of crucial narrative thing that happens for elevated horror right because if you think about hereditary critical reviews of hereditary were all about how it's like a family drama right and that's very much how people came into it and so when you actually get to watching the film and you do an analysis or just close study of hereditary like

[00:25:37] it's only kind of a family drama like it's really a drama about how the family's constructed by outside forces to screw everyone inside the family right we start with that great shot of peter and stephen waking up peter's waking up in the morning in his bedroom but we start by going through annie's workshop of miniatures and then push in very slowly onto one of them only to have

[00:26:03] it come alive with characters right and i don't know how people initially read that in theaters but i bet a lot of people were just like cool shot and then forgot about it and only at the end do you realize as it pulls back out and shows peter with all of the cult members around him now possessed by paimon um in a very like model of the treehouse that he's been a model figurine toyed with by these

[00:26:29] outside forces the whole time so the family is very much in these films something that is a source of control and power that's that's that's new and that makes it very aligned with marxist ideas about family abolition and the family as the privatization of care right something that just exploits your ability to care by pushing it on to people inside the family and saying no one else

[00:26:54] is responsible all right so capitalism hates you marxism and the new horror introduced me to so many great films before i let you go why don't you give us just briefly what are some fantastic new horror films that not a lot of people have seen that you would recommend oh let's see i mean i've unfortunately i watched too many i'm trying to think of the good ones i've seen recently like uh let's see i don't think i put deadmail in there um free waka was very interesting

[00:27:23] of sinners of course i i mean i assume everyone has already seen sinners yes like if you haven't seen sinners and obviously you need to go see that um i would avoid nosferatu the remake but that's just me oh that was that was kind of me too it was just kind of yeah i we could go on about eggers but uh let's let's talk briefly no let's talk briefly let's talk briefly i mean i got a marxist scholar here let's

[00:27:48] talk eggers because this is my feeling as you know you know a a a rank amateur but i feel like i don't know i just don't think he has a lot to say with his films and that movie was no different than it was just like the new dracula they could have called it dracula this was universal's latest update less interesting than the couple uh version and it's just it's okay yeah i i will say i was mad within

[00:28:17] the first three minutes so i don't know like so if you look at so i wrote about the witch in this book and i watched interviews with eggers uh from the release and already i was kind of pissed at the way he would talk but his whole conceit for the witch is that he's just representing how people thought at the time and one of the problems with that film is the way that he represents how people thought at the time is um there are no native americans and the land's just there for you to take and you're like

[00:28:45] i i don't know if that's you representing what the settlers thought or that's just what you think um and you see this persistent claim that i'm just representing back what other people thought at the time he and he does that with the the next film right the lighthouse where he's it's really aesthetically beautiful the choices made to shoot in that way but it's not a film with a that much depth or that much connection to actually thinking through a problem either at the time or

[00:29:14] now and then i skipped the northman because i was mad well let me say i can tell you briefly about the northman because he said the same things like i'm representing their beliefs and that's fine but the representation ends up basically being like the video game god of war i thought it was like a kick-ass action movie it's fine for but it's not really more than that i actually think it was a mistake to market it as art house they should have marketed as the north man like a superhero like

[00:29:43] thor i i i that was for my positive review of the film you know like it's not that arty it looks cool but it's just like fun i would actually watch it for that but yeah but the the claim that it's always like oh this is how people really thought is just maddening so then when you start nosferatu and it's got a highly mobile camera and because i started life as a victorianist i saw the costumes

[00:30:11] and i went hold on a second this is not fucking 1899 this is my partner as well my partner was already like oh no what are we doing here why are we in the 1830s dracula is a story about modernity and the confrontation with modernity if you push it back to the 1830s you can do modernity stuff but it doesn't and it just avoids it altogether so like okay the original book is all about

[00:30:36] the past confronting the future and technology and this one has dick to do with that and at the same but we have tons of technology in the film in terms of how the film is made so instead what you get is this highly mobile camera and eggers is not a mobile camera guy up until now maybe he does it in the northman but like yes yeah okay that makes sense but here it's just like he's going through the victorian streets and i just got mad immediately i'm like so we got a highly mobile camera we're in the

[00:31:02] 1830s what is happening here and then he doesn't have anything to say about it because he wants to then try to extract some kind of way of thinking from a book by displacing it from the 1890s to the 1830s and then changing the setting like who are you who are you trying to represent i don't i don't know whose point of view he's going for in this movie and so it just felt very um exploitative in a variety

[00:31:25] of ways including how it treated its main female character and boys anyway so yeah i was i was not i was not a fan yes all right so we we we've taken the detour to you know put eggers in his place well i'm i'm very happy to do that briefly what are some we you didn't make this book about the classics you easily could have we talked briefly about you know why uh we already talked about why

[00:31:53] but what are some classic movies that you think because we are losing recipes josh i know so there's nothing so basic that you cannot recommend to our young listeners to tell them they should go and check out and watch if they're young marxist interested in horror if you are a young marxist interested in horror you should absolutely track down basically everything associated with val lutin so i mean the most famous one's cat people but white zombie i walked with a zombie and one of my

[00:32:20] favorites the seventh victim which is an amazing film and not seen enough i think criterion just re-released it um you got to look at all the romero dead uh films right night dawn day don't forget about that's why i love day of the dead and it's like i don't think that one gets enough love it's where else are you going to see um the amer the the leader of the american military torn limb from limb by zombies

[00:32:46] and just start going yeah that's what that movie's for um you have to see alien um invasion of the body snatchers i would go with the 70s version over the 50s version oh interesting i i like the 50s i like the 50s yeah i think the 50 version is a little bit less sexist i like the little bit more for that reason okay i'll give you that i mean the 70s are a bad time for gender politics

[00:33:09] um and carpenters you know the thing they live and if you're looking for a fast i'll i'll throw in my my weird pairing i'm convinced that wes craven was trying to do something better in how horror dealt with race when he tried to do the serpent and the zombie that he got screwed by the the studio and then he made people under the stairs i think that there's like an interesting sort of trajectory from serpent in

[00:33:38] the rainbow people under the stairs and scream where like eventually becomes just extremely white meta horror almost as a commentary on the genre itself and what would what was allowed to be made so i i think those are are useful too and ultimately spawn the scary movie series by the wayans brothers before they got screwed out of it by their studio and now brought back it keeps happening it keeps

[00:34:07] happening so capitalism hates you marxism and the new horror film joshua goodch thank you so much for joining us where can people find you they can find me on blue sky at joshua gooch and they can find me at joshua gooch.com i have like a professional website i don't know do you still have to have

[00:34:32] one of those i feel like you you have to i mean all the other websites are owned by nazis but there's only websites that people go to so they are and so i just like i have this one so i always know that it's there and i'm i'm old enough that i remember like if you had your own if you if you could own your own web address that it was worth doing so that's that's my age all right folks thank you so much for joining me this is a wonderful conversation we'll have to have you back on sometime a commentary

[00:35:01] or something i would love to talk to you more and hey don't you have a radio show as well don't you have your own show i i don't i did who i look i i was it was there a different person i thought you had i i was trying to look you up maybe it was uh something maybe the different joshua good there's there's there is a joshua gooch blues guitarist who's like half my age and i did see him that guy okay that might have been a mix of blues i saw the blues guitarist i was like oh that's a cool looking

[00:35:30] good too yeah all right folks that's struggle session have a good one peace see i told you that was a good one i hope you enjoyed it i certainly did thank you all so much for listening you enjoyed this episode and want to support the show get hundreds of bonus episodes commentaries all that good stuff ad free just subscribe at patreon.com

[00:35:58] slash struggle session