Episode 87 transcription

Our friends over at rev.com- a transcription service company- have taken the liberty of transcribing episode 87 of the podcast, in which we discussed Ryan Murphy’s Eat Pray Love.  If you’re interested, you can read the full transcription after the jump.

Tyler:               Hello, I am Tyler Smith, and this is More Than One Lesson Episode 87. I wanted to say thanks to everybody that listened to last week’s minisode, although it was hardly mini; it was almost a full hour in which we talked about Twelve Angry Men. We spent a surprising amount of time making predictions about this week’s episode, which we will follow-up on a little bit later. First, I want to welcome in my co-host, Josh Long.

Josh:               Hi, everybody.

Tyler:               Josh, how’s it going?

Josh:               It’s going all right, Tyler. I’m here. Really what else can I do?

Tyler:               Well, you could be here.

Josh:               Nope, I can show up. That’s it.

Tyler:               All right. Being somewhere physically doesn’t necessarily mean you’re there emotionally.

Josh:               It’s all I can give you.

Tyler:               I know that. We’ve been friends for a while. I know better than to expect any kind of emotional investment.

Josh:               They say 90% of friendship is just showing up.

Tyler:               Who said that?

Josh:               I don’t know.

Tyler:               I don’t know, some bad friend. Okay, although that is probably … that’s a good portion of it, just show up; like back when I’d do plays and stuff, my friends would show up.

Josh:               Exactly.

Tyler:               They would sit there, they would not applaud …

Josh:               They hated the show.

Tyler:               They would boo on a regular basis, but you know what? I appreciate that they were there.

Josh:               Exactly.

Tyler:               Moving on, so that’s Josh, those of you that are new to the show.

Josh:               Hi, everyone.

Tyler:               That’s him, and that’s what you can expect from him. That sort of …

Josh:               It’s just more of this.

Tyler:               No real announcements to speak of this time around, except that in about five days from when this goes up, be on the lookout for Battleship Pretension, Episode 334, I think, in which our buddy Josh is going to be a guest.

Josh:               That’s me. I am taking over all of your podcasts, not yours, but the listener. Whatever you listen to, I am going to be on it eventually.

Tyler:               Give it time.

Josh:               All podcasts.

Tyler:               Just show up at the Comedy Bang! Bang! Studio, just do some kind of dumb voice …

Josh:               I just knock on the door, get a character, there we go.

Tyler:               What kind of character would you do over there?

Josh:               I do a crazy Italian guy, who is like, “Oh, my meatballs.”

Tyler:               All right. That’s sounds pretty good.

Josh:               It’s a fantastic idea. Yeah, I’ve been shopping it around all the podcasts, Radio Web said “no,” but it’ll work eventually.

Tyler:               That’s the thing. You just show up with that accent and just saying, “My Meatballs …”

Josh:               “Mama Mia.”

Tyler:               Then, Scott Aukerman will just ask you questions and then you probably … he’ll shape the character for you, which is fun. Anyway, so yeah, be on a lookout for that. We’ll post it … no, I guess we won’t post it here. I should explain. Very soon I am going to be out of the country for just over two weeks and so we’re going to try and fit in one more minisode before I go.

Sorry about that, so we’re not going to be recording, we’re not going to be posting anything while I am gone. Hopefully this will tide you over. What is this? What is the “this” of this episode?

Josh:               I don’t even know.

Tyler:               Your notes are in front of you.

Josh:               Oh, that’s … all right.

Tyler:               Okay. Last week in minisode, we mentioned that we would be talking about a movie that no one was clamoring to hear our take on, because everyone just assumed they would know what we thought. They were probably right. It is Eat, Pray, Love. Came out in 2010, it was directed by Ryan Murphy, who co-wrote the film with Jennifer Salt.

It’s based on the book by Elizabeth Gilbert. The book, I believe, I don’t have it in front of me, but I think it spent 150 weeks on the New York Times best seller list.

Josh:               Wow.

Tyler:               Because it’s a travelogue and a memoir, they figured this could make for a pretty good movie. From a visual standpoint, as far as locations and such, I would say that it does, but we’ll get more into that a little bit later.

I forgot to write down a summary, but I’ll try to summarize it right now. It’s based on a true story by Elizabeth Gilbert, who was a successful writer several years ago.

Josh:               Based on her own story.

Tyler:               On her own story. Yes, thank you, in which she got a divorce from her husband and then spent about a year, right around a year, traveling to different places in the world, Italy, and then India and then Bali, so that she could spend time, for lack of better term, “finding herself.” There is a spiritual quality to it. There was, as one might expect, a culinary quality to it. Then, in the last leg of her trip in Bali, she actually met somebody that would go on to be her second husband.

Josh:               Spoilers.

Tyler:               Yeah, sorry everybody. She wrote a second book, the name of which I don’t have in front of me, I am sorry, in which she talks about married life with her new husband and that sort of thing. It’s just going from place to place and meeting new people and eating, praying, and, Josh, loving.

Josh:               Yeah.

Tyler:               That’s what we’re going to be talking about today.

Josh:               Loving.

Tyler:               Lovin’, absolutely. I like to say lovin’, without the G at the end.

Josh:               Whole episode about lovin’.

Tyler:               Yeah, we will take your questions. Okay, anybody that listened last week, they knew that we have … we made some predictions about what we would think of this film, because the film could be called a “chick flick,” I don’t necessarily like that term. It did seem to appeal primarily to women.

I looked this up; the week that it came out, it came in second at the box office. Second to The Expendables. Those are two very different audiences.

Josh:               That weekend, it’s rare that you see a weekend that is so split down the gender line. Not many women going to see The Expendables, not many men at Eat, Pray, Love.

Tyler:               I have to assume one gender or another either saw what they wanted or got dragged to something they didn’t want to see.

Josh:               That’s probably why Eat, Pray, Love was long as it is, because they were like, “Well, The Expendables is this long. We got to match them because you know the couples are going; just split and they want to be out at the same time.”

Tyler:               I would venture to say, Expendables is not as long as …

Josh:               Probably not.

Tyler:               All ready we’re starting to make fun of it. I do want to say at the top before we get into it because we are going to be very honest and we may at times get a little insulting. Hopefully, we never stray too far into that territory and we can remain civil.

First, I do want to say that, okay, Eat, Pray, Love is based on a true story and it was written by Elizabeth Gilbert. These are her experiences. I am reluctant to speak derisively or negatively about these things, because I don’t want people to say “Oh, you’re judging this woman.” The fact is if I read the book, if I met her, I might not like her, I might like her, I might agree with her decisions or disagree, my agreement doesn’t really matter that much in the long run. That’s beside the point. This is a movie. The only version of Liz Gilbert that we have is the one that the movie shows us. In that way, she is no different than any other movie character, real or fictional.

Some of you maybe have read the book, some of you maybe have seen interviews with her and you know who she really is, what she really like. As we talk about the characters, we talk about some of the character’s choices. It may sound like … it’ll be very easy to say “Oh, those guys are bashing this person that they don’t even know.” We’re just talking about the movie. If it interacts with real life, okay, that’s fine. But to me, it’s no different than talking about Oliver Stone’s Nixon. Clearly, there might be some fictionalized qualities to it even if the facts themselves are true. That’s the deal. This is all we have to go on. Hopefully, you’ll cut us that type of slack.

Eat, Pray, Love, here we go. A quick overview of our predictions. My predictions were that the film would fall prey to Erin Brockovich syndrome, which is another Julia Roberts film, in which the supporting characters, I believe the way I phrase it is, it is though they got the script ahead of time and recognized, “Oh, this is not about me. This is about someone else. I am a supporting character in somebody else’s story. As such I should be very accommodating to them.” The film is not that in some ways, and it is in others …

Josh:               It depends on the character. It seems like, probably I would guess that the people who are major parts in the book and are therefore based on a deeper knowledge of a real person; those are probably the ones that get a fairer shake.

Tyler:               Probably, yes.

Josh:               I’m trying to think some of the characters, the people that she works with to a point … Viola Davis, at least. The other guys kind of …

Tyler:               Even Viola Davis, who plays, I think her publisher or something like that, somebody that she works with one way or another. She is accommodating, but she also plays the role of the woman who shows up and gives one line of advice that sounds very sage and all that. There is no real character there. She is accommodating. She is not opposing our main character, but she serves … she is a function of our main character.

Josh:               She is a foil to her in at least that one scene, she says, “you shouldn’t do this because of this and this and that.” She does oppose her in that way, but not in a strong enough way to actually change the character’s opinion.

Tyler:               Right. It’s not unlike in a film where you have a character who is saying a monologue, but you don’t want to just have them say a monologue. You’ll occasionally have someone there to say, “Well, what about this?” just so that you could have the character … That’s why she is there to provide maybe the audience a voice.

Josh:               Yeah. Or like the janitor who pops out and says, “Hey, you guys can’t go in there.” Then is totally ignored.

Tyler:               Yes, yes. Purely a function of the story, but there are other characters, for example, Liz’s ex-husband and her ex-boyfriend and one of her other love interests. Frankly, I went in really expecting these guys to not be three-dimensional characters, to not be allowed to have feelings of their own. The only feelings that matter are her’s. That is not the case. We are allowed to see their pain. We are allowed to see their sadness and their reasons for doing what they do. That is something that surprised me.

Josh:               That’s good, yeah.

Tyler:               That is a very good thing. That is a huge step in the right direction for this film. Where it does fall into Erin Brockovich syndrome is smaller characters, who show up and basically … for example, Liz will be at a local healer or something like that.

Josh:               This is the worst one in the movie, the one that you’re bringing up.

Tyler:               She got a cut, and so somebody is fixing her cut. Then this woman, this other woman bursts in …

Josh:               Absolute stranger.

Tyler:               Yeah. Total stranger bursts in and says, “Oh there’s the … ” telling about her life and all that. Then she says, “Oh, hello.” Then, there’s the briefest of introductions. Then, she says “I am having a big party tonight, you should come.” She says, “You should come” in the same way … for example, if I was throwing a party, I would tell you, Josh, “Oh, you need to come,” like we are old friends and I feel like, “Oh, you should be there.” She doesn’t know this woman. There is no reason that she should be there except maybe, “Oh, random stranger, I am having a party, the more the merrier, and you are one more person there.” Awesome. It’s not that; it’s a weird familiarity.

Josh:               It as if they’re friends already. That tends to happen with a lot of smaller characters that she runs into throughout the movie. They seem to want to instantly become extremely friendly with her, which just rings untrue.

Tyler:               It is most notable with a character named Richard, played by Richard Jenkins, who … the character is kind of a series of clichés in the things that he has to say. Richard Jenkins is a consummate professional and manages to turn those into a real character, but nonetheless you just see him making eyes at this woman, but not romantic eyes, more just general intrigue. Admittedly, this is in India, he is an American, you can tell he is probably an American. There is not a lot of them around. There is probably that.

Josh:               Well, I would have given him more if there were few of them around, but there do seem to be a lot of white people there. Anytime they are speaking, they are speaking American English. I feel maybe the movie … maybe you should have tried to be less diverse in that moment, it would have been better for the final product.

Tyler:               The idea of being in a place that … while you’re comfortable there, it is still unfamiliar and you still stick out and then you see someone who is just like you and is like “Oh, this is, here we go.” It’s not that. He just comes over and immediately just makes himself very comfortable. Some of that is a shortcut for the character himself to show that, “Oh, he is a very brash type of guy, and he is just going to say what he thinks,” and all of that. It also is just … it is though, just before the camera … just when the camera lands on them, you see him like, he is flipping through the script, and then throws it away and says “Oh, oh, okay, now is my time to talk to this woman, right?”

Josh:               Oh, there she is.

Tyler:               “Oh, the star of the show.” The film does do it, and it doesn’t. I am very happy in the places that it doesn’t fall prey to that. We will talk more about that a little later. Your first prediction, what was it, Josh?

Josh:               It was that Julia Roberts would have a moment where she dances in the rain.

Tyler:               Were you correct?

Josh:               I was in fact not correct.

Tyler:               You were not correct.

Josh:               Eat, Pray, Love, my apologies. I thought there would be a dancing in the rain scene.

Tyler:               You were incorrect. I was half incorrect, I feel like. You’re doing pretty good here, Eat, Pray, Love. Now my next one is that Christian theology would be rejected in favor of Eastern religion.

Now, I am half wrong on that because Christian theology is not mentioned or acknowledged as a thing at all. I do not expect every film to … I don’t expect every film to at some point have a character acknowledge that there is such a thing as Christianity. I don’t care about that.

It is interesting that the character does go looking for answers. She does in a moment of sadness and desperation, she starts praying. It’s clear this is not a thing she does very often. When she decides she wants to become a more spiritual person, it seems to me that no matter where you are or where you’re from, if you are going to embark on a certain journey, your first sensing would probably be to go with what is most readily available and what is the most familiar, which in her case would probably be American Christianity or maybe Judaism or something like that.

She immediately finds … I am not sure what you could call it. It was kind of a Buddhism type of thing, but it was also maybe Hinduism in there; basically there is a guru that she is following.

Josh:               I think it’s closer to Hindu. It’s probably closest to Hare Krishna, which is not as popular as it was in the 70s in the public … American public scene, at least. It seemed very similar to that, like the chanting and the … It might be something that’s similar to Hare Krishna, it was not the same. I don’t know what it’s called. It’s called Krishnaism or something, I don’t know exactly. I should know that, but …

Tyler:               It should be noted. I feel kinda bad that I am a little vague on the details, but at the same time the film itself is vague.

Josh:               The film is vague on exactly where … it’s some brand of Indian, probably Hinduism because …

Tyler:               I think Hinduism, because I think they mentioned “Ganesh.”

Josh:               They referenced some of the Gods of the Hindu mythology, the Hindu system. I just remember that.

Tyler:               I am half wrong on that, but I am not thrilled that I am wrong. It doesn’t necessarily … the film is doing something right, I would have liked to … Again, it’s based on a book, maybe in the book she addresses more directly why the stuff that most people would be familiar with. In, what is it, Crimes and Misdemeanors or Hannah and Her Sisters, when Woody Allen goes, entertains various religions.

Josh:               I think its Hannah and Her Sisters, because I have seen Crimes and Misdemeanors more recently, and I don’t … I remember that, but it seems more distant to me.

Tyler:               Okay. I think it might be Hannah and Her Sisters. Even a character like that, who actively rejects a lot of these things, even he gives these things a try. With her, we just see her immediately jump into this thing. This very vague, amorphous type of belief, but we’ll talk more about that a little bit later. Your second prediction, what was it?

Josh:               It was there will be at least five moments in the movie where I would groan because of a line or development. If we’re talking straight up groan, I think that wasn’t true, but there were enough moments when I was frustrated or would slap my forehead or something like that. Once I remembered what my prediction was, I was like, I feel like if I groan now, I am doing it on purpose, so I kinda ruined my own prediction.

There were probably more than five moments throughout the movie where I thought that’s … no one would ever say that that’s ridiculous, that’s … I don’t know. I hate to … those sound like dismissive criticisms, but in the midst of the film, especially when you are really trying to get onboard with that film, then when I think it has somebody say something … Most of Richard Jenkins’s dialog is ridiculous. They’re trying to make him endearing, but it comes off as he comes off as a buffoon or something. Until you get into a little bit of the meat of his personality, he speaks in these dumb aphorisms that no one would ever use, and that I’ve never heard before. I think it’s just lazy writing, is the best I can …

Tyler:               Absolutely. That’s the thing, is I am even okay with some movies having characters who just spout this kind of pop psychology and general philosophy, just in the most quotable way possible. I am even kind of okay with that. I don’t necessarily like it, but I am okay with it. This is supposed to be reality. This is supposed to be her story. It’s supposed to be the world that we all live in. I feel like nobody … you know, maybe people feel like that’s what we do on the show. You know why? Some of our episodes are two hours long. We clearly do not sum things up in a single sentence.

Josh:               Yeah. I don’t know. Maybe that doesn’t … maybe that is not a problem for some people, but it definitely was for me. Then I think, there’s a couple … We’ll get to more of those specific things that we didn’t like about, I guess. There were … I guess the best way to say it is, there were several moments when I feel the film is artificially pushing its story forwards.

Part of that may be because her journey takes place over a year; there have to be a lot of developments, a lot of these characters are people that she becomes friends with.

In real life, those would develop slowly over time. There would be natural developments. Rather than a movie, where they are like, “All right, we’ve got to get the rest of this in quick.” It’s a long movie. It’s over two hours and 20 minutes, its right around there.

Tyler:               It’s right around there.

Josh:               Even with that length, they are stretching, they are trying to pack all of these characters in and get enough with these characters, but it’s too much. It’s trying to do too much in not the best format for telling how these stories …

Tyler:               I am glad you said “format,” because I was just about to ask. Themes aside; the film explores a lot of things. In a way … first off, the things that it explores, I am fine with exploring, but I think the conclusions that it comes to are incorrect, but that’s actually beside the point. The question I was going to ask is, do you think this film would have made a better documentary than a narrative film with actors and a script?

Josh:               Yeah, I think so, because then it gets to the reality of these places a little bit more, which I think is something that we will talk about in a little bit; a bone I had to pick with it, but also it doesn’t feel it’s beholding them to a certain narrative. It doesn’t have to force a narrative upon this character. It just would happen naturally.

Tyler:               The weird thing is, there is already a natural narrative. It’s somebody who spent a certain amount of time going to different places and ostensibly absorbing aspects of the culture and meeting people. That’s the story. There is a narrative to that. Yet somehow, Eat, Pray, Love … and it’s something that really happened and yet somehow Eat, Pray, Love feels artificial.

Josh:               Turning it into this “chick flick” movie type of narrative, it just loses a lot of it’s … I would imagine, having not read the book, I would imagine the book is a lot more insightful. Even if I don’t agree with the conclusions the writer comes to, I would have to assume that the book is more insightful and is more thoughtful and just comes off as more natural.

We already talked about these characters that pop in for no reason, and are her best friend all of a sudden. Every time one of those things happens, that’s a groan moment for me.

Tyler:               It reminds me a lot of the movie The Blind Side, in which you have an interesting story, but they just feel the need to make it as accessible as possible. In doing so, I think they compromised the integrity of the story itself. What’s his name? Michael Oher? From The Blind Side? He saw the movie, the real guy, and he said … in an interview, first off, he had tremendous good humor, and he said, “Well, look, I knew how to play football. This wealthy suburban wife did not teach me how to play football. I was a little sharper than the film made me seem.” Then, he said, “But I guess I understand it’s a movie.” It just ends there with a number …

Josh:               Good for him. That’s a fantastic attitude to have about a movie that really doesn’t have a lot of respect for that character.

Tyler:               Yeah. It makes me wonder. If you were one of these people, like, there is a girl that Liz meets in India, who is arranged to be married and all that. She approaches Liz, not unlike the “Richard” character. She just shows up and just starts talking, and conveniently enough an awful lot of her issues about an arranged marriage are very similar to Liz’s views on marriage in general at that time.

I found myself wondering, “I don’t know if that girl is based on anybody, but if she is, I wonder if she would have watched this movie, would she think that is not how I am, and that is certainly not how we started talking. I look like an absolute crazy person walking up to a stranger and just unloading my problems.”

Josh:               I’ll have to say, those are the types of moments that made me groan. We’ll talk about more overarching things that we had problems with later.

Tyler:               We have already touched on my third prediction, which is that there will be, what I call “Hallmark Philosophy,” which is just the lines and sayings and aphorisms and moments, nuggets of wisdom that sound like they could come out of a Hallmark Card, which is to say, simple, easy to understand, not at all complex. Frankly, I think any type of philosophy, it could be spiritual philosophy, it could be economic philosophy, it could be artistic philosophy, I feel any conclusions that somebody has come to, it is probably taken them a long time to get there and it will probably take more than a sentence or two to explain it.

This film dumbs down everything and makes it super simple as though, “Oh, this is the easiest thing in the world to understand, and certainly to implement.” It winds up being frustrating, because I know that. Again, I don’t know what the book is like, I could see the book actually expounding on a lot of these, but I could see people watching a movie like this thinking that it’s therapeutic. They try to put these things into practice only to discover that, “Oh, these two sentences are not going to help me that much.” Again, it’s entirely possible. People could look at a Bible verse that people post on Facebook and say, “Well, that verse is not enough for me.” Or whatever.

It can happen with anything, but the film, which purports to be about this woman just discovering all these different ways of living, and learning, and it doesn’t seem that interested in what she is learning, only that she is learning, which then brings me to your third prediction. What was that?

Josh:               Well, what we have written down here is the character will not learn anything, which is … those may have been my words, but I don’t know if that’s exactly what I meant. I think what I was predicting is more of that the character wouldn’t really have an actual change. That she would start out feeling one way and she would also finish the movie feeling that way.

If you know anything about literature, there are often times you categorize characters as either static or dynamic characters. Static characters stay the same, where the dynamic characters go over some change.

Tyler:               Static characters are often supporting by their nature, if you had a lead in no matter what medium, if you have a lead, they are hopefully a dynamic character, and Liz kind of isn’t.

Josh:               Not really. The film wants her to be, and wants to present that she is, but I think it mistakes her process of feeling like she is self-actualizing. It mistakes that for her actually making a change in the way she views that world.

I don’t think she changes it all in that way. In the beginning of the movie, she thinks, “I am unhappy with my marriage; I am unhappy living here and doing what I do in New York. I will be happier if I go travel the world, if I see these places that I’ve wanted to see and if I dive into this Eastern philosophy issues in trance by, and go to see this Medicine Man, which is in Bali. That’s exactly what … the movie just says, “You’re right. You’re happier now that you went and you live life happily in Italy, emerged yourself in this Eastern philosophy in India, and then went to Bali to help this Medicine Man.”

Tyler:               We will talk more about her character, because that’s … we will start at that point getting into the themes of the film, where we think it’s lacking and that sort of thing. We will get to that in a little bit later. I did not expect us to take so long on our predictions, but at the same time in talking about them, we would end up talking a lot about the film in general.

Josh:               That has covered a lot of our things, and we don’t have to bounce around covering those.

Tyler:               That’s the thing, is I don’t want people to think that I just … I mostly didn’t like the movie, but I’m of the opinion that there are things that you can like in a movie, no matter what. Just every movie probably has something that you can say, “You know what? This thing is not good at all, but that is pretty solid.”

Josh:               Dinosaur Valley Girls has got that music.

Tyler:               That’s what I’ve heard. We all know about the music from Dinosaur Valley Girls.

Josh:               Dinosaur Valley Girls. Everybody is on top of that.

Tyler:               That is for no one. That is literally for no one.

Josh:               Here’s what you can do. Our Companion film features an actress named Karen Black, you maybe familiar with … with whom you maybe familiar, my apologies. You can check her IMDB page. It gets crazy when you get into 80’s and 90’s. She is in a film called Dinosaur Valley Girls. Just check out some of the user reviews on those.

Tyler:               Apparently some people found it disappointing. Moving on, and yeah, I can’t even … to talk about why they found it disappointing, I don’t think I could even talk about it on this show.

I do want to first talk about the things that I liked and responded to, about this film. The first thing, I have already mentioned it, is allowing the characters that have been hurt by Liz … That’s my phrasing, I am not totally sure if the film itself would put it that way, but the people that feel hurt as a result of something that she did. It allows them to feel that hurt. I think that these men are played fairly well. One is Billy Crudup, who is an actor that I think is mostly underrated. I think he is pretty solid. I thought he was really great in Almost Famous. His movie called Jesus’ Son, I don’t know if you ever saw that.

Josh:               I haven’t seen that one.

Tyler:               He is good in that. As much pressed as Jackie Earle Haley gets in Watchmen, Billy Crudup is quite good as “Dr. Manhattan.” Just in everything that he is in, I always enjoy him. He is not in this film very long. He plays Steven, her first husband, and the character is kind of oblivious. He is not totally reliable, but he does genuinely love her, but at times he seems like he is not really willing to step out of his comfort zone.

There are a lot of elements to that character that could have made him seem loudish and just totally oblivious. Billy Crudup brings real humanity in that character. James Franco plays the guy that she gets with after her marriage is over. That’s a character that … he is kind of hippy-dippy, he is an actor who may or may not be good. The film doesn’t give him a lot to do. There are moments where he seems very selfish and very moody and all of that. Yet, James Franco still makes that work.

A lot of the performances are good, and the last one is Richard Jenkins. As we mentioned already, as a character named Richard that she meets in India. The character is just nothing but platitudes, but there is … Richard Jenkins does what he can with those, but there is one scene specifically, it’s … I would say the best scene of the film, where the character is allowed to monologue about the things that he has been through in the past. The things he feels he needs to be forgiven for, the things he struggles to forgive himself for. It’s the history of alcoholism, and losing his family as a result of that. It’s a fairly well-written monologue. It comes out of nowhere. It sticks out like a sore thumb, but the monologue itself is still pretty good. He performs it beautifully. Props to Ryan Murphy, who never cuts back to Liz to see her reaction; it stays in a static shot on Richard Jenkins. It’s one of those things where, when something is good, sometimes the director just needs to get out of the way, and that can be a choice. He made that choice, and did it well.

Then lastly, Javier Bardem plays Felipe, the guy that she meets in Bali and falls in love with. Javier Bardem, he is a charming guy.

Josh:               He is both charming, he has this charisma. He is just a fantastic actor also, and he is just interesting to watch. I feel he makes all of his characters interesting one way or the other.

Tyler:               Here’s the thing. He is somebody who without really doing anything too remarkably different, he creates such specificity. That’s the character from Skyfall, that’s the actor from Skyfall.

Josh:               He also plays a James Bond villain, and he plays a heartless killer from No Country for Old Men. He is the same guy. Yet, here he is this charming man that it makes total sense that she falls for him.

Tyler:               Did you ever see Before Night Falls? He was nominated for Best Actor for that. I don’t know if I think he should have won, but it’s a great performance. If have you haven’t seen Before Night Falls, you got to, it’s a good stuff.

Josh:               He is in the Spanish movie, I can’t remember the name of, where he plays that famous artist who …

Tyler:               The Sea Inside.

Josh:               That’s the one. He is great in that too.

Tyler:               Wait, I didn’t see that one.

Josh:               That’s a totally different, again a totally different character like …

Tyler:               That’s the thing. It’s just through mannerisms, through cadence and just with this character, he does need to just be a guy who is mostly relaxed and laid-back, and he plays that really well. Because in that moment you need to be … the best thing you need to be is, or the most important thing you need to be, is in the moment comfortable inside your own skin. An example that I give for that even though it’s stylized movie is The Big Lebowski, Jeff Bridges is playing the “Dude” and just the thing I often say, I think I said it on the Episode 10 of the show when I talked about acting. Just watch him sit in a chair. He will sit and immediately find the most comfortable position and its total instinct. It’s not … the actor isn’t saying in that moment, “Oh, you know, this is how the Dude would sit.” It’s just total instinct. I think Javier Bardem just in the way that he flirts with the character, the way that he talks to his son, it all just seem totally in the moment.

That’s the thing. It seems like that where he … and Julia Roberts is an actress, who has a fair amount of charisma herself. Even in a character that I don’t like and I don’t think is really there, and I’ll get more to that in a little bit. The scenes between them, it’s like she starts to come alive as an actress and the two of them have a nice rapport, and it’s so nice to see. I have nothing against watching a romantic comedy or romance provided there is a genuine spark, and there was.

Josh:               There are elements of him also that I like, he is “quirky” a little bit, but he is never a second guessing himself about any of that. Either as the actor or the character. He likes to make mix tapes like Phil Collins and stuff. He even makes fun of him for it, in the movie, but it’s making fun of someone who is like, “Why? I don’t understand what you mean?” Like, “This is great, I love this.”

It’s an unselfconscious character and it’s an unselfconscious performance. I don’t know if I’d say the film is worth watching for these performances, but they are genuinely good performances. A few of the other things; I do think that the film is shot fairly well in some ways. Specifically the section in Italy where … so listeners of this or Battleship Pretension probably know about my “super tasting,” in which there is a lot of food, specifically anything with any kind of spice, that I have a hard time eating. That often means Italian food. Not that it’s remarkably spicy, but it can be. I tend not to like Italian food, but the film shoots the food so well, that part of me is like, “Ah, I wish I wasn’t me in this moment.” I just wished that I could really go for some of that. Even then, she is eating pizza with toppings unlike I would never like that. You know what? It does look really good.

That’s something that the film needed to accomplish in that moment. It needs to look as good as possible, and it does. The city itself looks really good. Once again, the filmmaker gets out of the way of the natural beauty of a place.

Josh:               When it hits the moments of being like a travelogue, whether or not it fits with the tone very well, because a lot of times I think it doesn’t, but it still … that part is shot well. It’s still pretty looked at it. It’s interesting to watch. You can easily make that stuff boring.

Tyler:               Absolutely. I am trying, … and make it just seem very flat and like, who cares?

Josh:               Right.

Tyler:               I am trying to think of the other things that I like about the movie. There isn’t much, but the stuff that I had mentioned already is, a travelogue film needs to look good and it mostly does.

In a road movie, which is what this kind of is, the supporting characters need to be interesting and played well, which a number of them are. We need to have a sense of who they are, and we have that as well. There are definitely good aspects to the film. I will acknowledge those. The film is … in its goals, it is somewhat ambitious, which is no small thing. The more ambitious you are, the further you have to fall.

Josh:               The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Tyler:               Yeah. Those are … is there anything that you liked about the film that I have not mentioned yet?

Josh:               I don’t think so. I think we covered all of the things that I’ve enjoyed.

Tyler:               Okay. I don’t necessarily want to get into all of the things that I dislike because I filled several pages of notebook paper with that. I want to try and boil it down to a few key things.

Josh:               There is probably four major things, I would think.

Tyler:               Okay. Do you know what they might be off the top of your head?

Josh:               I have thought of at least three of them at separate times.

Tyler:               We’ll go through a few of them, and we will end with the character of Liz.

Josh:               Exactly. I was thinking of the same thing, yeah. Let me think what I want to start with. I am thinking of different aspects of the character that I don’t like, but I think probably its best to describe it all as one thing. I am trying to reorganize it in my mind for how to go about that. What were some of the things we talked about in the groan moments? I am trying to remember that.

Tyler:               I will lead with something we’ve already touched on a little bit, which is just the … I know it’s going to be very easy to say, “Oh, Well, Tyler is a Christian, so he has a problem with this, that or the other thing.” You know what, maybe? Maybe If I wasn’t a Christian I wouldn’t have a problem with the film’s version of spirituality. It’s entirely possible, but I am, and so I don’t know.

What I will say is I feel it doesn’t matter what religion you believe in; I think it matters in the long run, but in this moment, it’s … if a film treats your religion the way this film treats, I am going to go ahead and say Hinduism, I feel you would be insulted. It’s just … and again, movies are very … I’ve said it in past episodes, it’s hard to show faith of any sort in a movie. In a visual medium where unless you feel … unless you want to have a visual representation of God, which is a hard thing to do as well, at that point, you have to base it entirely on good writing, good performances, and a confident director, who knows when to cut, who knows when to stay and that sort of thing. This film mostly does not have that.

Josh:               I don’t feel like it’s the director who feels like there is a lot to this, more than … anymore than there would be a “Self-help book.” Anymore than it would be a Chicken Soup for the Soul. It’s just sort of an attitude. This is a comforting thing, and that’s all there is to it.

Tyler                That’s the thing, is what’s infinitely more cinematic is her relationships with men. The film spends a lot of time on that.

Josh:               The film even knows that to a point, because it opens with that. In the opening monologue, she is talking about relationships. It keeps coming up. People are asking her, “Why don’t you have a man and … ”

Tyler:               Yeah. That’s the thing. The title is Eat, Pray, Love. The story is structured that they are all equally important. They are all central to her journey. I got the “eating” part. That whole section, and letting herself go and enjoying the food that she is eating and not counting calories or carbs or anything like that. That is very palpable. We get a strong sense of that.

The “love” part, we get a very strong sense of that, because she is going back and forth with another character. The “pray” part, the writers seem to have no confidence and they seem to … maybe they thought they were capturing it well, but more than anything they just seem … It just all comes back to talking with another character and it turns into just another relational thing.

Once again, this is the thing where … if it were a documentary, and I am sure in the book, spelling out what she believed, why she believes it, how she arrived there, those are better mediums, media or whatever, to show that. Part of me wonders what could the movie have done? It’s already at 2:20. Could it have added another ten minutes, in which she is talking with the Guru, talking with other people that believe these things?

That more than anything, I went in to the film worried that it would be … that they would become a part of me sort of some pop religion sort of thing. There isn’t that, because there isn’t anything. There’s really no religion. The big thing is … the one thing that I noted, and I don’t know if the film does, when she is in Bali, she is there to learn from … this is a different guy; this is a guy that is not considered to be a Guru. He is considered to be a “Medicine man” or “wise man,” but a man that is rooted very firmly in spirituality.

Josh:               They just talk of meditation and both, and he encourages her to continue in the meditations that she learned while she was in India.

Tyler:               The whole thing that she … the whole reason she is in Bali is to talk to this guy. Then, she meets Javier Bardem. There is a scene in which they are hanging out and she mentions … and they are enjoying themselves and she mentions, “I haven’t gone to see this guy in two weeks.”

When she eventually does go to see him, it’s been even more time. It’s clear at that point … and it’s, “Okay, so she hasn’t been meeting this guy. She hasn’t been meditating. She has been with a man.” That’s when you realize that, for this character, whether the film knows it or not, whether she knows it or not, religion just seems to be what she turns to when she doesn’t have a man.

Josh:               Have a man. Yeah, the placeholder instead of a relationship.

Tyler:               Which is something that actually the Viola Davis character mentions early on. Maybe the film is more aware of it, but I feel it loses any hint of that. It views that whatever her spirituality is to be a totally positive thing, all the time, even though it is totally nondescript, it’s completely vague, and she drops it the minute she finds a guy.

To me, if … let’s say, she was studying Christianity and then she dropped that when she found a guy. It doesn’t matter what the faith is in that moment, just that it’s clearly … it’s like in Hollywood, where you are talking to somebody that you find interesting and then over their shoulder you see someone more interesting walk in. Like, “Oh, they can help me more. I am going to talk to them.” Faith is the person at the party that she talks to when she has no one else to talk to.

That was a big thing that bothered me. Again, I don’t know what they could have done aside from just change mediums.

Josh:               Or not make a movie.

Tyler:               That’s always an option.

Josh:               The one that I … This is a twofold thing. Major one was I think in two major ways that the movie and perhaps the character are not … seem a little oblivious or maybe myopic about the way that they look at things. The first is the cultural representation and the idea of these places and their cultures.

They are treated almost as if they are merely vacation destinations. Maybe there is a degree to which they are for her, certainly Italy; she is there just to enjoy herself. I feel it’s disrespectful to any of these places to just show them as,  “Happy Italy. It’s where people eat and they enjoy doing nothing.”

Tyler:               Yeah. You never see anybody at their job because they enjoy doing nothing, so why would you ever focus on not doing that?

Josh:               There is a false sense of what the place actually is, and that is some kind of an escape. Whereas it’s a real place with real people who have jobs, who have miserable lives, some who have good lives, but it’s a place like any other. It’s not an idyllic fantasy world; neither is India, neither is Bali.

Tyler:               This is represented visually when she is in New York and admittedly in a bad place emotionally, but when she is in New York, her marriage isn’t going great. It’s dark and raining and just miserable. Then, anytime she is somewhere else, it couldn’t be … it’s the best time of year ever. It’s not too hot, not too cold, it’s the best … it’s like, did the Italian Board of Tourism sponsor the film, because that’s how it seems.

Josh:               There is a moment in the India segment, where she has been driven from the … presumably from the airport.

Tyler:               It’s an introduction to Italy. It’s night time.

Josh:               To India. She is in a taxicab and she is driving through all these places and this is … maybe my guess is that this is the only part of the movie where maybe they were actually in India and the remainder were shot on a stage somewhere or in California somewhere, because the rest of it she is in an ashram, I guess, which seems to be enclosed. They stay there the whole time.

On this drive through, she’s seeing like dirty streets, squalor trash, like all of these things and then suddenly when she suddenly she gets to this place, her destination, it’s just pretty and clean all the time. It just seems strange to me that the movie can have her drive through the stuff, show her driving through part of the bad part of India and then say, “Well, actually her experience is like this. Never mind all of that.” Never mind the man behind the curtain.

The same goes for Bali. They don’t really … there is no visual representation of it. There is no disconnect between two different ways that you see visually there, but I know very little of Bali, but I assume there are as many negatives as there are positives. It’s not all parties on the beach and cabanas with the canopy beds and air blowing through; the island breezes blowing through everyday.

Tyler:               Yeah. People vacation in Mexico pretty regularly, but they do not vacation in the part of Mexico that I went to for my mission trips, which was the slums of Juarez. That doesn’t mean they are not there.

The thing is the attitude winds up being a little patronizing. It’s not merely grass is always greener on the other side. It’s not merely that. It’s this idea of wherever I am is not good, wherever I want to be is better. If there is somebody already there, then clearly their lives must be better.

Josh:               They are wiser and they know more beyond you.

Tyler:               They know more simply because they live in … and it’s just like, “I have so much to learn from them. I will learn it and then I will go back to civilization.”

Josh:               It’s so weird because there is this … traditionally the concept of the other has for a long time been something that’s more negative, because it’s something unfamiliar and something outside of itself, that is strange and maybe confusing in some way. Somehow elements of Western culture have turned this around, to where the other is the positive. Anything that I am is negative, anything that other people have and know is better. It’s very strange.

Tyler:               That’s the thing, is the idea of the other being negative, that’s not necessarily great either, but it’s not unlike Avatar, if you’ll excuse me.

Josh:               No, that’s right. Yeah.

Tyler:               Listeners might remember my rather zealous Avatar episode that I had to apologize for later. In my tone, not in what I said.

This idea of going somewhere, looking around me, like, “You guys got it worked it out. No, I’m never going to live like this. I’ve got a real job, but boy oh boy, you guys really have it worked out, I am just …” because at that point … here is the thing, a phrase that we come back through time and time again on the show is “seeing people as people.”

Now what that often means is you see someone you don’t agree with or someone that you feel like is less than, and you take away their humanity, you only see where they oppose you and that’s all. You never see them as a person. That’s where we go most of the time, but there is the flipside of that, where you see somebody because of where they live or the type of life they are living. You see them, its like, “Oh, you are so great, everything here is so great.” If you are not seeing a person’s problems, you are not seeing them as a person either. You are just seeing them purely as a representation of something. Never as a person that you can engage with or talk to or whatever. I feel that’s what this film has. It winds up being … It really is like a travelogue, but it’s also just this vacation thing where it’s like, “Hey, rich people. Do you want to relax for a while and feel as though you are growing as a person? Come to these places. Don’t go to the slums though. You don’t want to go there.”

Josh:               That leads me to the second moment, where I think both the film and the character may be missing something, is the idea of the money. All of this is possible because this character has maybe what seems like an unlimited income. Anybody who is able to leave their home, leave their job for a year is more well off than most people in the country. The idea that this is the thing that helps people to understand themselves, this is how you can be self-actualized is, I feel, disrespectful to anyone who is not a rich person.

Tyler:               To make reference to our … how would you call it, our Queen of Versailles episode, that’s not to imply that if you are rich, you can’t have problems or whatever. When someone says, “The solution to my problem was traveling the world for a year.” That’s not really that helpful. I do find myself wondering if the film and maybe the book, but I don’t know, if it’s almost a version of where the viewer feels they can live vicariously through her, because they could never do this on their own.

Josh:               I think that’s certainly part of the appeal. I can understand how that’s enjoyable to people. That’s why a lot … there’s a lot said about how movies in the 20s and 30s and 40s were a lot about very rich people or people in high areas of society, because it was an “escapism” for people who, especially in the 30s, were having a pretty hard time.

Part of the problem of it just being the fact all of this is possible because of her wealth. It makes everything just too convenient. There are very few challenges for the character and there are moments where they could be, but they are made up for by the fact that she can just do whatever she wants because she hasn’t …

Tyler:               The fact that if things ever got to, fill in the blank, to this or that, if something that she doesn’t like, she can always just get a plane home.

Josh:               That’s one of the other things. I guess this doesn’t … I was thinking this connects to the character, but I guess it’s separate. The stakes in this movie are so low. There is nearly no risk for her. She is never in any kind of dangerous situation. The highest stakes seem to be the emotional ones, but …

Tyler:               There are films with emotional stakes, and they are still very good.

Josh:               That can happen.

Tyler:               The Companion film, for example.

Josh:               This doesn’t really have that. She never really opens herself up very much emotionally. The closest thing is when she is in India, Richard encourages her to forgive herself. Not even to forgive other people, to forgive herself for something that we never even really see her blaming herself for, and this is getting some  into the character, but …

Tyler:               I’m fine with moving into that at this point.

Josh:               I guess so. Maybe our entry into that is just by saying, one of the things about the character is that she has … I don’t know.

It might be separate. The main point I was trying to say is there are … the stakes are very low so that there is not a lot to be invested in so much, more than just enjoying the pretty pictures and thinking about how good Italian food tastes.

Tyler:               Yeah. That’s the thing is, as I said, there are films, good films where the stakes are purely emotional. What is often necessary from an artistic point of view in those films is a truly dynamic, but also an interesting main character. The thing that … so, you and I had talked pretty extensively about the movie after we finished watching it.

One of the things that I wrote down, because there is a scene between her and Felipe there at the end, and as I said, the two actors have chemistry, but when we see that Felipe is willing to do anything, he is willing to make sacrifices for this woman, he is willing to do all this, and he loves her and all that sort of thing. The thing I wrote down in my notebook was, this character, Liz, is a blank slate. I don’t know why anybody would love her.

Now, she does go through … she does run through the gamut of emotion. She has sadness, she has anger, she has happiness, humor; she has all of these things, and yet I don’t know her.

Josh:               None of this with a possible exception of the humor, none of those emotions are ones where we are really onboard with her or understand really why she feels that way.

Tyler:               This gets into maybe some of the thematic a little bit, but the big thing is she does seem to … for example, the divorce seems to come from her first. Her husband does not want a divorce. He is willing to fight for her even if it’s against her. He certainly is not perfect. He is rather oblivious, and he is rather unaccommodating. He also does claim a very devout love of her. That’s neither her nor there.

The divorce does come about as a function of her. She knows that she is hurting him. Then, when she breaks it off with her boyfriend after that, James Franco, she initiates that ending as well. She is always aware of the hurt that she has caused to these men. She seems to regret it, but never so much that she questions the rightness of her actions. Not unlike a parent who has to punish their kid or spank their kid and they say, “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” I understand why parents say that, because they don’t enjoy doing this thing, but they recognize that it is necessary.

When it comes to a relationship between two adults, where there is no abuse involved, there is maybe some neglect, sort of, perhaps. I am not sure. Emotional neglect, I don’t know. At that point, “necessary” is a very subjective term.

Josh:               Definitely. Even the neglect thing, I think … just as easily in that case that she is being neglectful on either of those relationships.

Tyler:               Certainly towards the end of them, yes.

Josh:               Yeah. The idea there is she breaks off these relationships, but we don’t really understand why she does or do these things. We are not totally on … I am never onboard with her when she makes these decisions.

You might be able to make the case that it’s because I am thinking of it from a man’s perspective, being a man, but I really don’t feel the movie does a lot to show us why she is unhappy with these people. It’s just to show us that she is unhappy with these people, which I don’t think is enough.

Tyler:               It almost reminds me of … I’ve been making a lot of analogies, I apologize. It almost reminds me of … and you’ve seen numerous scenes in the films and on television, maybe in life of this, where somebody is … they have done something wrong and they are crying and somebody says, “Are you crying because you regret what you did or are you crying because you got caught?” You know what I mean? It does seem to be that thing of like, they are crying because they have to face the consequences of a choice they made. They regret the decision because of the consequences, not because of the decision itself. Their regret only goes back so far.

I feel more than anything she is like, “Oh, I just wish that I could have broken it off and it didn’t hurt anybody, because then I could feel great about my decision. As it is, I still would have made it, but I am regretting that this had an impact on other people.” There is a line that I wrote down, “I didn’t want to hurt anybody, I just wanted to slip quietly out the door.”

Josh:               That’s talking about when she wants to leave her first husband.

Tyler:               Yeah.

Josh:               The idea is that she doesn’t want to hurt anybody, but it’s less … it seems much less because she doesn’t … because she feels for them and she doesn’t want to feel like the bad guy. She never wants to feel like the bad guy.

If she feels guilty at all, then that’s just going to sour her experiences, and that’s ultimately the movie’s conclusion is that you shouldn’t feel bad about it, you should forgive yourself, and you can just feel okay with what you do.

Tyler:               I wish I had written this down, but if you feel bad towards somebody like you have … you’ve let them down, you’ve disappointed them, you’ve hurt them or whatever, that part of the forgiveness is “send light and love their way and then drop it.”

Here is the thing. In Christianity, we do believe that there is room for self-forgiveness, that you should not hold on to your own mistakes, your own sins. At the same time, if you have hurt somebody there also is, I feel, an obligation to do whatever you can, because there are real world consequences. There are spiritual consequences and real world consequences. Through salvation and Christ’s sacrifice, we have managed to avoid the spiritual consequences. That doesn’t mean that there are none in the real world. In the real world, we have to deal with them. If we’ve hurt somebody we have to try to do whatever we can to make their hurt less, whatever that might mean in any circumstances.

Josh:               It may not be something we are able to do, but there should at least be an effort. Certainly with her husband there is no effort to resolve, to reunite any ties or anything like that.

When you think about it from an outside view, somebody who hurts people and then in theories “sends light and love their way and then moves on.” From a practical standpoint on the outside, it looks a lot like a sociopath. Like just because you haven’t have … because you have made peace with it, within yourself. If you hurt these people, and then you just think can make peace within yourself about it and then move on, that’s a terrible person.

Tyler:               There is a scene where when she is leaving her boyfriend, and she is going to go to … she is going to go on her trip, and there are scenes in which he feels as though she is smothering him, because she got into this relationship right after her marriage and didn’t so … yes, she probably was a little codependent on him. He is maybe a little rude about it. It definitely sees in that moment her point of view not so much his.

Anyway, as she is going to leave, he is really upset about it and he says … it’s James Franco, so of course it’s charming, he says, “If you stay, we’ll have Indian food every night.” because he knows she is going to India. She says, “You never asked me to stay.” Then, she gets in a cab and then she says, “Go, go, go.”

Josh:               I think we’re supposed to feel that’s an empowering moment, when really it’s kind of petulant.

Tyler:               Yes, it is. It’s saying, “Yes, I recognize you are trying to make things better now, but it’s too late.” Then to me, it seems interesting that she says that, gets in the cab and says, “Go, go, go,” as if to say, “All right, I don’t want to be faced with the sadness that my lack of forgiveness of other people is causing. Now, if you will excuse me, I am off to forgive myself.”

Josh:               Yeah. “I don’t want to deal with my actions and the consequences they might bring. Let’s go off to Italy and enjoy my disposable income.”

Tyler:               Yeah. That’s the thing. Here is where someone could say, “Oh, it sounds like you are actually bashing the real Elizabeth Gilbert.” I don’t know how these conversations went. It’s likely that she doesn’t remember how they went. I don’t say as a function of her. When is the last time you remembered word for word an important conversation you had? I don’t remember what I just said.

I don’t know how this went down. All I know is the movie. In the movie, this character is, if you will pardon me, emotionally monstrous. At the end of the film, I don’t have this in front of me, but at the end of the film, when she has found happiness, it cuts to her ex-husband. You see him walking down the street laughing with his new wife and his new child. You see her ex-boyfriend on the stage, getting applause and smiling and happy, and its like, “Oh, they wind up happy too.” It’s fine. You don’t have to feel bad. What I wrote down was, “Everybody winds up happy in spite of Liz’s best efforts.”

Josh:               That’s just a happy coincidence. If that’s the reality, it’s not as she did anything that made those situations better. In reality, it could have been James Franco’s character who is going to be unhappy for the rest of his life. It could be that …

Tyler:               He enjoys that applause, and then he goes home to an empty apartment and starts crying.

Josh:               He goes home and Strojak’s playing and he hangs himself. Or just because you show us that Billy Crudup turned okay. He turned out okay, he ultimately got what he wanted. The only reason that’s happening is because the movie decided that happens. There is no rationale to say that this is the logical conclusion, because of what happened in this movie. I don’t know if … that might be a deus ex machina, I don’t know.

Tyler:               It feels like it, I mean it’s just … I don’t know, it’s almost … it’s like in Murderball. Did you ever see Murderball, the documentary?

Josh:               No.

Tyler:               It’s quadriplegics.

Josh:               I got it mixed up with Rollerball.

Tyler:               That’s a very different film.

Josh:               Yes, it is.

Tyler:               Murderball is an Oscar nominated documentary about quad rugby, quadriplegic rugby, in the … pardon me, it’s not the Special Olympics; it’s the Paralympics, which is a different thing. There is this guy who is recently injured, he is confined to a wheelchair and he is asking about quad rugby, and he is like, “Well, you know, what happens if I get the ability to walk again?” because some of these guys do. Through rehabilitation and therapy, they are actually able to walk. He says, “What if I am able to walk again?”

The guy that he is talking to, who has made quad rugby his life, and he is a superstar at it. He says, “Well, then you walk.” Then, “Yes, you can’t play this anymore, but you have this other amazing thing.” In that moment you realize, “Oh, this guy has made … he has really made a go of his circumstances, and has gained success in a way that he never would have otherwise. But if it came right down to it, he’d prefer to walk.” You know what I mean?

It’s like, yes, James Franco’s character, he might have success in this way. He probably would have preferred to have this relationship keep going. Yes, Billy Crudup, he did seek out somebody else, he did get over it. That was only because what else could he do.

He had no choice. The thing that he wanted initially was taken from him. You know what? Early on, maybe he did not work to keep it. There is that. You are married, I’m married. We all have our moments when it was like, “Oh, we probably have not treated this person as well as we could have, we probably were not as … I don’t know, we might have taken them for grant or whatever, we weren’t very accommodating.” We all have those moments. That’s the thing as … hopefully this is not just a function of me being a man, but it’s me being a spouse.

I look at Eat, Pray, Love and I say, “Oh my gosh, how horrifying.” I have been married over eight years now.

Josh:               That’s weird.

Tyler:               Anyway, I’ve been married over eight years. We’ve had our good patches, we’ve had our bad patches. If I left every time things were going rough, I would have been married, I am going to say, two years.

Josh:               Anyone who has been married for any length of time can say that they’ve had moments in their marriage that has looked worse than what seems like the depths of the worst part of Liz’s marriage.

Tyler:               Yeah, absolutely. That’s the thing. I feel bad that we’re bashing the character, but that’s the thing, the character is so rooted in herself at all times.

Josh:               That’s the biggest problem I think with first becoming attached to this character, because I don’t find her likable throughout the entire film. Then, where we disagree with the philosophy as a whole is that it is a character that is at heart selfish, continues to be selfish, and triumphs through selfishness.

Tyler:               Yeah. Thankfully the film did not get very good reviews. I don’t know, those that saw it, I don’t know what they thought of it, but I have to assume that there are people that watch this and they are empowered. They feel like, “I don’t ask for enough.” I am not saying … I am not talking about confidence, in which you as a person, you do have a right to your opinion. If you are in a marriage where your spouse is not treating you well, you do have a right to say, “You are not treating me well.”

Josh:               Yeah. If you are in a marriage relationship where you are just not happy, that’s at least something to be addressed. That’s not something to be swept under the rug and ignored because damn it, you are married, you got to say that way. The way that this presents this is not … what was I trying to say? I lost my train of thought, but where were you, what were you saying?

Tyler:               That circumstances can be bad …

Josh:               Yeah, I think that got me there.

Tyler:               This happens.

Josh:               Circumstances can be bad and they should be dealt with, but this movie does not present a responsible way of dealing with your circumstances.

Tyler:               Right, absolutely not. It basically just says, “Run. If you are not happy, run”.

Josh:               Yeah.

Tyler:               Yeah, you might hurt someone and yeah, you might not be happy about it, but you know what? Forgive yourself. You know what? They’ll be fine. They don’t need you. That’s the thing. It really is a sociopathic philosophy.

Josh:               It is.

Tyler:               The idea of I can do anything I want to somebody, and “Hey, people are pretty resilient.” If I breakup with someone, they will probably find someone else and that person will make them happier than I ever could. It winds up looking, maybe it can look almost like modesty or humility, but what it really is doing these mental and emotional gymnastics so that you can do what you want to do, and convince yourself that everyone else will be fine.

Oddly enough, that’s the thing is more so than any spiritual thing that I disagree with in the film, that philosophy which in this character is much deeper than her spirituality. She basically seeks out the type of spirituality that tells her she is right. It starts with her. Whatever feeds into that is good, whatever detraction that is bad. She found a version of Hinduism that says, “You are great and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” I am sure there are other versions of Hinduism, and certainly there are other religions, that don’t say that.

Some of them maybe a little too harsh and say, “You are pure awful, and you should never forgive yourself.” I am not saying that’s a good one either. By weird coincidence, she found just the right one for her. Sooner or later, … there is a Tim Keller sermon that I have posted, and I even posted a little clip of that on the website, in which he talks about, “If you are coming up against the truth, whatever that might be, again, it could be spiritual, it could be emotional or whatever. The truth is almost never …” I say, almost because I tend to equivocate, “The truth will never match up exactly with what you want.” Otherwise it wouldn’t … either it wouldn’t be the truth, or you are just the best person.

Josh:               I feel like I say that often that, if what is right for you seems to down the line match up with what you want, you might need to re-examine with what you decided is right for you.

Tyler:               Yeah. I do want to move in … we will move into the Companion film real quick, which you just watched for the first time about an hour ago, one could say an hour and 20 minutes ago. It is the Bob Rafelson film, Five Easy Pieces that came out in 1970. It stars Jack Nicholson and as I mentioned, Karen Black.

Josh:               Karen Black, star of Dinosaur Valley Girls.

 

Tyler:               I am glad you said it because I couldn’t remember what it was. The film was nominated for best picture, actor, supporting actress and best original screenplay. I saw the film a number of years ago. I think I was still in high school. It’s weird to me how I just discovered movies.

There are some movies that I knew about, because they were nominated for Oscars or they wound up on the AFI Top 100 list or whatever. The Five Easy Pieces, what? It is the film that made Jack Nicholson a leading man, because before this he got people’s attention in Easy Rider. From that, he got this and from this he got everything else. Maybe I knew about it as a function of that, but I feel like not. I just stumbled upon it, and I remember really responding to it, but I haven’t seen it since then until you and I watched it tonight.

I am reminded of why I like it, and I love it even more now, especially after having watched something like Eat, Pray, Love. The stories aren’t exactly the same, but the character instincts are. The story here is there is just this guy working in the oilfields of … I am going to say the Bakersfield area. I believe Five Easy Pieces was shot around Taft, California, my hometown. I thought Texas, because there is some southern accents, it’s the oilfields, but then I remembered then he drives to Los Angeles …

Josh:               I remember when he is driving to Los Angeles and seems to be just for the day. He is in somewhere where there is oil and close enough that he can get to LA in a day.

Tyler:               Then, he drives up the coast to Washington, which if he is driving from Texas, and he says, “It will be a couple of days.” If you are going from Texas to Washington, it will be more than that.

Josh:               That’s a long drive.

Tyler:               From an accent standpoint I do know that a lot of people, including my dad, wound up in California because of oil and so a lot of Texans came in; it’s interesting, California which politically is a predominantly liberal state, right in the middle where the oilfields are, it’s remarkably conservative politically because that’s where a lot of transplants from other parts of the country … there is transplants everywhere, but people are there for oil.

That already is interesting to me that it takes place there and it could have taken place somewhere else. That’s one of the things I like about the film is how specific it is. There is a lot of general things that it talks about by having it take place in the oilfields of California, which are lesser known. Then, it’s revealed that Jack Nicholson’s character “Bobby” is from a family of musical geniuses, and he himself is an accomplished pianist and that he just fled from this family years ago for whatever reason, and you would never know that this very blue color working-class guy could, if he wanted to, be in symphony somewhere or an orchestra or something like that. That I think is very … it’s weird, sometimes in movies these days they will try to get specific and there will be a quirk to it, but the quirk almost seems too clever. This seems like just a thing.

Josh:               Yeah. There is a more natural specificity to it. I feel like a lot of times especially in Movies now when they set something in a place because they are making to say, “Everybody knows what this place is.” It takes place in LA; you know what LA is. We don’t have to go to any trouble to show the place or we can just present it as the stereotype of whatever that is. I think that movie takes place in the South. It’s a movie that just struck me kind of felt like this and it’s specificity with something that’s not necessarily familiar, but seems real is To The Wonder, it takes place a while ago in rural Oklahoma. I have spent very little time in Oklahoma, but I see it in that movie and it’s unique enough that I know it’s somewhere I haven’t been, but somewhere that I believe.

Tyler:               That’s the thing. By having these … and then a good portion of it takes place in Washington, not Seattle. It takes place in California, but it’s not San Francisco or Los Angeles; Washington, but not Seattle, like all these other places.

Somehow that just lends an air of realism to it.

The character, who is working in the oilfields and has just discovered that his girlfriend is likely pregnant, I don’t know if it’s ever official.

Josh:               They never say it specifically, but that’s another thing I like. There is a lot of … the movie is not making an effort to overexplain everything to you. They set up the situations, and you can get the … they have more faith in the audience than a lot of mainstream movies there. They will have to explain everything. If there is one guy in audience who might not get it, we got to make sure he knows what’s going on. I would rather just not make a movie for that guy. The guy is like, “Now, wait a minute, where do the Avengers come from?”

Tyler:               There are movies to be made for that guy, but they don’t all have to be made for that guy, maybe that’s what I mean. He gets tired of his job and so he quits it and then when he finds out about his girlfriend being pregnant, he is basically going to leave her, and he tells her as much. What happens is he finds out that his father has had a couple of strokes and that gives him a reason like, “Hey, I got to go visit my dad, goodbye everybody, see you later. Goodbye forever, goodbye life.” His girlfriend is just so pathetic, played by Karen Black. Just so pathetic and she threatens to kill herself and all these things. She is very dramatic, but she is also rather childlike, childish, but also childlike.

Finally, he is like, “All right, do you want to come along?” They go up to Washington to visit his family. She has no idea who he is or where he came from. He by the way, he leaves her in a motel for two weeks, because he doesn’t want her to see …

Josh:               With no car.

Tyler:               With no car.

Josh:               In a town she has never been to, he just leaves her in a hotel for two weeks. She doesn’t have his number. There is no way to get in contact with him.

Tyler:               We laugh at this, but of course that’s quite cruel. He doesn’t want to take her to his family, it’s not that he would necessarily be embarrassed by her to his family because he doesn’t necessarily care much about his family, it’s more just … it’s one more thing to manage. Does that provide you guys …

Josh:               I think there is an element that he just doesn’t know how to present him to his family. There is the relationship with the other character, which I wondered if that’s part of it too, like, he knew there were something with this other … I guess she is his sister-in-law.

Tyler:               Basically I don’t think … there is this other woman there that is engaged to his brother. He has a history with her.

Josh:               Yeah. There is clearly some kind of history between the two of them. You can tell there is a sexual tension. Maybe part of it is he expects her to be there, so he doesn’t want “Rayette.” He doesn’t want her around.

There are several reasons to it, but again still it is rather cruel. Here is the difference the two movies is that he has never made out to be a very good guy. He is definitely selfish for a lot of it. He has moments where he goes back and where he flip-flop back and forth where he … case in point, when he says, he is just going to leave “Rayette” and then he comes back and says, “All right come with me.” That’s a flip-flop there. He is still the type of person that was going to leave her even if he didn’t ultimately, and he is still a type of person that leaves her for two weeks. Even if he …

Tyler:               He cheats on her pretty readily.

Josh:               Yeah.

Tyler:               Yeah. It’s clear from early conversations with his family that they go long stretches where he does not return back to the house and they have no idea where he is, they talk about in the past, they debated hiring a private detective and to find him and that sort of thing. I wrote down a quote that he says to his father, he says, “I move around a lot, not because I am looking for anything really because I am getting away from things that get bad if I stay.” The idea of I move around a lot, you start to wonder, “Okay, what does that mean?” He says that towards the end of the film, but you get a strong sense of, “Oh, he …” and I don’t necessarily want to ruin the film for people because it’s not a film that’s incredibly well known except for one scene. The scene in the café where he is talking to a waitress and she is not giving what he wants, and so he comes up with this convoluted way of getting what he wants. She calls him out on it and he says something really mean.

That if anything as what people know about the film. I don’t want to ruin it, but I will say that basically the character, it ends with the character once again being selfish in just such a heartbreaking way.

Josh:               Yeah.

Tyler:               That’s the thing. First off, maybe because of Jack Nicholson being a really great actor even then, even as so young a guy, but also just the way the character is written, I have a strong sense of who he is and where he comes from and not just because we see his past, you just know he just doesn’t fit anywhere possibly because he doesn’t want to let himself fit anywhere. He probably just … he genuinely seems to not like himself. He also seems not to be too thrilled with other people either. You can tell he does have a soft spot for “Rayette” because he brings her along.

Josh:               There are enough moments where he gives in to her, not merely because he feels like he has to … there is moments where he could not give her what he wants, but he chooses to give her what he wants because there is still some kind of connection there.

Tyler:               Yeah. That’s the thing as he cares for people, but he can’t … or he is unwilling to stop what he does. He seems to know that and regret it, and he tries to do the right thing, but often can’t. There is this tension to the character. Whereas … and he often seems to know what he is doing is wrong, but he does it anyway. Whereas the character of Liz, she regrets what she is doing, but she would never not do it. You know what I mean? There is a big difference there.

I don’t know if there is ever a scene of apology. I don’t think she ever apologizes. I’m back to Eat, Pray, Love. I don’t know if she ever apologizes to anybody.

Josh:               I don’t know she, no, she didn’t apologize to anybody.

Tyler:               There is this one really … there is one scene where there is a good, it’s a good bit of dialog where Liz is … she is in India, she is talking to her ex-boyfriend. She is crying, and he is crying, and he says, “You sound good, you sound stronger. She says, “So do you.” He says, “Well, I am an actor.” It’s a nice moment because it acknowledges that … by her saying, “So do you,” you almost get the impression that she wants him to be doing well so that she can feel a little bit better about herself that, “Oh, well, I didn’t destroy him.”  Then, he says that fairly devastating line of, “Well, I am acting.” You have hurt me a lot, and if I sound stronger, it’s because I don’t …

Josh:               Just a face I’m putting on.

Tyler:               Yeah. You get a little bit from her, but not very much. I don’t think she ever comes out and says, “I’m sorry.” If anything, it’s “I am sorry, but …” Whereas you get genuine apologies from “Bobby” in Five Easy Pieces, but you also get his nature and that he just can’t seem to stop himself.

The film is … it ultimately is very … he is a tragic character. Made all the more, … and deeply frustrating because he is hurting people around him. It’s just … I don’t want to spoil the end, but it’s a very … I just said the word “devastating,” but it’s a very devastating ending, emotionally, I think.

If you haven’t seen Five Easy Pieces, seek it out, it’s good stuff. I do want to … I want to see if … I already read a few quotes here. There is a character in Five Easy Pieces named “Catherine” and she is talking to “Bobby,” and then I am going to quote her and something she says to “Bobby,” and I am going to quote something that Felipe says to Liz. This should give you a general idea of the philosophy behind both of these movies. She says, “You are a strange person, Robert, I mean what will it come to … what will you come to. If a person has no love for himself, no respect for himself, no love of his friends, family, works, something, how can he ask for love in return? I mean, why should he ask for it?” That’s a complex idea. It is saying there is nothing around with loving yourself, there is also other people around. If you are going to ask other people for love, you should probably be willing to give of yourself a little bit.

Contrast that with a line that Javier Bardem does his best to sell in Eat, Pray, Love, where he says, “Balance means not letting anybody love you less than you love yourself.” That basically just says … I will say, I keep coming back to marriage, but that’s often what the film is about. I have no doubt that there are times when Jen has loved me less than I have loved me. I know that there are times when I loved her less than she loved her. When it says, “Don’t let anybody love you less than you love yourself,” so that means one or two things, either you demand that they love you more, which I believe is one of the big themes of Citizen Kane and why he winds up so alone. Or you leave them. Its like,” I am not going to let you treat me this way.” That’s the kind of thing people say when they … right before they storm out.

One says, “You are right, don’t let anybody ever treat you a certain way.” One says, “It is important to love yourself if for no other reason so that you are then better equipped to love other people, because then you will, if you will pardon me, deserve love a little bit more.” One is an emphasis on other people and our relationship to other people. One is, people only matter in so far as how they are to you. I feel … one film was made in 1970; one film was made in 2010. There is a 40-year difference. In that time, I feel … this was at the tail end of the 60s when you are starting to get a certain degree of … what is it, the “Me” generation and all that.

Josh:               Yeah. I think the idea … the central idea of Eat, Pray, Love is more prevalent now than it was then. I don’t think that it’s just because we come to that point now. I think it’s the type of movie. There are movies nowadays that are more as espousing sort of Five Easy Pieces to you, or as there were movies then that were referenced as Love Story came out around.

Tyler:               “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

Josh:               Exactly, which is a similarly selfish way of looking at love.

Tyler:               Yes. Although it’s a weird thing because Ali MacGraw says that to Ryan O’Neal, as he is apologizing to her as opposed to he demands an apology from her. Then she says, “I am sorry, love means never having to say you’re sorry.” You have failed.

That’s the thing. Even in that moment, though it’s the sentiment I think is ridiculous, even in that moment she is using it as a way of extending grace to him. Do you know what I mean?

Josh:               Yeah, that’s true.

Tyler:               It’s such a … don’t get me wrong, selfishness is not a new thing, but now it’s … it reminds me of a quote from Network, in which Howard Beale says, something to the effect of, “Other countries are just as bad as the U.S, but we are the most advanced, so we are just getting there first.” It’s just about like, “We have so many more tools to cause our own destruction now.”

In the same way I feel like now what with the “Self-Help Movement” and don’t get me wrong, I love the Internet, but basically and with technology of the Internet, you have more power now than you ever have to surround yourself only with what you like and agree with. You don’t really have to engage with people that aren’t you, and people that will challenge you. I feel, yes, there has always been selfishness, but now we have turned it into a sort of art form, I think.

Josh:               I also feel like part of it, now we are just going to sociological theory, I think. I have always felt like part of it is the pendulum swinging back and forth between the way that’s … like parenting patterns. When people … when we were kids and this is probably like 10 to 15 year window there. It was the time when … there was a lot more of that. You can do whatever you want to do, parenting, like, whatever you like … we will give you whatever you want. Very coddling, I think. That might in a way also lead to this type of thinking.

Tyler:               The idea of … and that’s the thing. It’s a cliché to say, but it is something that genuinely does happen. There are schools and such where … I worry that we’re getting too political. I will say that there are schools and organizations there that will … they will have a soccer game, but nobody keeps score because no one wants to feel like they … nobody wants to lose.

Josh:               Exactly. Or like the schools where they don’t have letter grades because then people … it will ruin their self-esteem as if the self-esteem is something that needs to be fiercely protected or children won’t be able to function. You should think of it the same way that we think of germs. If you keep children away from all germs then they end up getting more sick because they don’t build up those immunities. In the same way, if you allow children to have their self-esteem broken at times, it allows them to be better equipped to deal with.

Tyler:               Yeah. You get stronger and you also recognize that you are not the only person in the world.

Josh:               Right. Again, that’s my opinion about sociology. I have no children, so there are a lot of …

Tyler:               That you know of, high five.

Josh:               I did not participate in that high five. You have been tricked. Anyway, all I have to say is that, I think that maybe one of the things that has resulted in more of a culture of feeling like you have to please yourself and make sure that you are … that you are being true to yourself making yourself happy.

Tyler:               Right. That’s the thing. While I am fine with being true to yourself. It’s weird how much those two things have become intermingled. Being true to yourself means being happy all the time and not settling for something that will make you not happy. That’s the thing; I am all for being true to yourself and “finding yourself,” and that can mean any number of things. It could mean finding out what your passions are in this life and just finding out what you are genuinely good at and what you feel like you would like to do. Those are legitimate goals.

So much of Eat, Pray, Love does seem to be less ‘find what you like’ as opposed to ‘run away from the things you don’t’, instead of engaging with them. I do want to quote a couple of things here from the Bible and then we will wrap up. The first is Philippians 2, verses 3 and 4, “Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves, let each of look not only to his own interest but also to the interest of others.” That could apply to any number of things.

Here we go. When I found … I was familiar with this passage, but not so specifically. So this 2nd Timothy 3, verses 1 through 5. In preparation for this episode, when I stumbled upon this passage, I realized that so many of these terms and these descriptors could be used towards the character of Liz Gilbert, it astounded me. I am going to read through them and then there is a sentence at the end that might be worth paying attention to. “Mark this, there will be terrible times in the last days, people will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanders, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness, but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.” Now, that is harsh.

Josh:               Yeah.

Tyler:               There are people who say, “The Bible and Christianity are way too harsh.” They could look at something like that and say, “That’s pretty harsh to have nothing to do with these people.” Shouldn’t we engage with these people, shouldn’t we try to minister to these people? I don’t know, what would you say to that? I have been thinking about this for the last few hours, but first instinct, what would you say to that?

Josh:               I don’t know. That’s a hard one to answer.

Tyler:               Yeah. Well throw this out there. The Bible also says, so I don’t have it in front of me, “not to cast pearls before swine.” If you are literally dealing with somebody who is all of these things, then they are probably not going to listen to you.

What might happen is it starts with people will be lovers of themselves, which is something we all are. I am not suggesting we hate ourselves, I am not suggesting we despise ourselves; we should love ourselves because God loves us. Thus, we are lovable as a function of His love. This is not a self-hate thing. What it means when it says, “Lovers of themselves,” it means putting yourself above every … any and everybody.

We all are naturally bent towards that, if you spend … if you spend enough time with somebody who is genuinely all these things, I feel like it’s just a matter of time before something breaks through and you start to think, “You know what, they might be right. Maybe on this one issue, maybe they might be right.” There is something to be said for not leading yourself right into temptations. Anyway, so it’s a combination of don’t try to minister, … try to minister everybody is sure, but after a certain point you will realize, “This person isn’t listening and all they are doing is frustrating you and confounding you in all of these things.” Really after certain point you do need to walk away.

That’s biblical. That’s good. That’s not merely me saying, “Here is what I think.” I will end with this, because the film ostensibly is about Liz seeking out answers, whatever those might be. I will throw this out there. This is Matthew 7, verses 7 and 8, “Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you, for everyone who asks receives, the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks the door will be opened.” Those are very positive statements. Those are saying, “If you are looking you will find it.” Well, Liz is ostensibly looking and she doesn’t find it. That I think is what I want to get to, is the idea of if you are really looking for, what Josh and I were talking about is, the truth. If you are genuinely looking for the truth, recognizing that it might not coincide with what you want.

Josh:               This isn’t really a character who is seeking to learn anything; it’s more of a character that’s just seeking self-validation.

Tyler:               Yeah. If you are looking for that you will probably find it.

Josh:               Sure. Those are two totally different attitudes to come to something in hopes of coming closer to the truth or learning something or … I guess either of those things are commendable from a human standpoint and from a biblical standpoint. I feel like the other one is much more self-serving and is less productive.

Tyler:               Yeah. There is a line that I don’t have in front of me, but it’s something to the effect of it comes in the form of voice over where she says, “God dwells in me as me.” That’s from Eat, Pray, Love, not the Bible. That’s the thing, is I am with you for the first part, not for the second part, because when … basically, at that point you are making yourself out to be God and literally anything you want, anything you like, if God dwells in you as you, those last two words that really change everything. If God dwells in you as you and if there is something you like, clearly God must like it too.

Josh:               Honestly, I don’t even understand how someone can come to that conclusion, like how someone can either write that or watch that in a movie and now think of themselves, “There is a problem with that.” The idea that you are God; it doesn’t say that, but if you think about that at all you are saying like, “God and our idea of God is in me, because it is me.” It’s like, “I create God, God is what I want God to be. God is what I want.”

Tyler:               Yeah.

Josh:               If that’s appealing to you to hear that, you have to stop for a moment, step back and think about that. What are the implications of that for how you interact with other people like if you are God, if God is in you through what you want, God is what you want and why should you listen to what other people say, why should you care about other people?

Tyler:               Why should you not murder other people?

Josh:               Exactly. That’s taking it all the way down the line, but that’s the logical conclusion.

Tyler:               It puts the self, and while from a political standpoint, I am all in favor of the individual. From a spiritual standpoint, it puts the self above literally everything and idolizes it. It literally makes a God out of the self.

Now, imagine every single person on earth believes themselves to be God. They run up against each other and it’s like, “Well, I am God and I say this.” The other person says, “Well, I am God and I say this.” Well, it looks like we should kill each other. As opposed to if there is indeed Truth, then that is outside of us. That actually, it may sound frustrating, it may seem unfair at times and it is unfair, should I delve into the notion of fairness? I don’t think so. It may seem unfair, but it actually can be quite freeing knowing that that’s there. I find the idea of me being God terrifying, because that means God is … because if God dwells in me as me, that means He is me right now, not me as I could be. That means God is deeply neurotic, self-obsessed, paranoid, and exceedingly judgmental of himself and others. That’s not a God I want to worship, that’s not a God that’s worthy of worship.

Josh:               What it boils down to is there is just not a lot of substance to that idea, and which I think I said to you after I watched the film that I felt like Eat, Pray, Love could … the subtitle could be embrace the emptiness of whatever it is that you happen to want right now, because that’s kind of what it celebrates. It can present it as something positive, because she is happy at the end of the movie, but the philosophy is, if dwelt on more deeply, don’t really hold up, don’t really have any kind of substance to them.

Tyler:               That’s the thing. Yeah, she winds up happy, but she is probably going to be happy one way or another in the first place. Not that money buys happiness, but given enough time she probably would have found a certain degree of happiness, maybe not contentment, but happiness. In that sense she is … I don’t think she is any better off at end than she is at the beginning. She has a guy now that she approves of.

Josh:               So did she at the beginning of those other relationships.

Tyler:               Yeah. That’s the thing. Yes, it could go that way or you could wind up like “Bobby” at the end of Five Easy Pieces. Again, I won’t say what happens, but basically, choosing yourself and just making everybody who has the misfortune to love you miserable, because in the end that’s what it is. It is deeply unfortunate for them that they were willing to give over themselves thinking that you are willing to do the same thing.

Okay. I will end on that. I do not recall what the next minisode is going to be. Do you know what your number five is?

Josh:               No.

Tyler:               I don’t remember. I don’t have it in front of me. Yeah, so we will try to do that and I will put it out on Sunday and then I will be in Switzerland and that should be fun. I will be having dinner with one listener, whose name is David or … I don’t know, it’s David with an e on the end.

Josh:               It could be Daveed.

Tyler:               Daveed, that’s what I thought. I don’t know.

Josh:               It could just be David, you’ll find out though.

Tyler:               I’m going to find out. That will be very exciting. Yeah, thanks everybody. Once again the nature of this episode is such were it does sound like we are coming down really hard on one person. We are coming down hard on a character, and the philosophy of a movie, which is perfectly fine to do.

If you have any questions or comments, you can email me, tyler@morethanonelesson.com. You can email Josh, josh@morethanonelesson.com. You can go on Facebook and join our group. You can follow me on Twitter @ morelessons. You can follow Josh …

Josh:               At the joshlong.

Tyler:               At the joshlong. I see. Oh yeah, don’t forget, if you want to buy any of our ridiculous t-shirts, go to morethanonelesson.com, click on the store and then look up the official More Than One Lesson merch.

Do you want Josh’s dumb face on your chest?

Josh:               Everyone does.

Tyler:               Okay, thanks everybody for listening. Josh, thanks for being here.

Josh:               You are welcome.

Tyler:               We will get to you next time. Bye-bye.