The Autumn 2021 season of the philoscifiz podcast is now out in full… another six episodes of Matt and Dave exploring on-screen sci-fi with philosophy…
There’s some pretty heavy episodes this season – although that’s not to say difficult themes belie comedy. Boots Riley’s countercultural sci-fi Sorry to Bother You (2018) explores the present, past, and future of slavery in contemporary corporate USA, and while deadly serious is utterly hilarious. Kathryn Bigelow’s wry cyberpunk noir Strange Days (1995) takes us back to the millennium and an apocalyptic vision of end-of-days Los Angeles. And – back in time further still to WWII – Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) from George Roy Hill is a humorous and sensitive tale of trauma and time-tripping.
We also fall in love with the first ever film to be adapted from a computer game – Super Mario Bros. (1993) from Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton – and discover a big concept film exploring parallel worlds. We get our hit of early classic sci-fi from Rudolph Maté’s, the brilliant When Worlds Collide (1951), where an extinction level event gives us a reworking of the myth of Noah’s Ark. And then there is David Lynch’s psychedelic and epic Dune (1984), which we watched before the release of Denis Villeneuve’s awesome 2021 version, and with which we kicked the season off in early October.
Along the way we encounter Nietzsche’s will to power and power of forgetting, Bergson’s theory of memory, Deleuze on incompossible worlds, Sartre on existentialism, and Hegel’s dialectic.
You can check out all the episodes here on our website + ya fave podcast apps…
And Matt and Dave will be back later in the year for a one-off winter solstice special… if you don’t already, why not follow us on one of our social channels for notifications and reminders?