Welcome to Episode #09 of The Official Popshifter Podcast, “Cults! or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Manson Family.”
The reemergence of cults into popular culture leads hosts Less Lee Moore and Jeffery X Martin into a conversation encompassing The Veil, Lana Del Rey, Charles Manson, matriarchal societies, and more.
Thanks to the movie magic of James Cameron and the pesky Celine Dion song, millions of people know all about the good ship RMS Titanic. How everyone on board was happy, from the rich people in first class to the immigrants in steerage. How Billy Zane went nuts and tried to shoot Leonardo DiCaprio. How the ship hit an iceberg, split in half, and sank like a stone. How even that wasn’t enough to kill Kathy Bates, because not even God can kill Kathy Bates.
Mike Nichols’ film from 1967, The Graduate, is a darkly humorous ode to the disenfranchised and distant. It’s also a definitive bad romance. The movie has a lot to say about toxic people and how they can mess up your life. Then again, pretty much everyone in The Graduate is toxic.
Let’s call it synergy. A television show comes along that loves and understands its core audiences so well will inspire a kind of devotion that borders on obsession. We’ve seen it happen with sci-fi shows like Firefly, Star Trek, and The Twilight Zone. Do you think today’s audiences would feel the same kind of adoration and allegiance to a show that regularly featured polka music?
It’s my belief that most people enjoy a good party. If that’s true, then the converse must also be true. Most people do not enjoy a bad party. The problem starts when you’re in a party that you think is good, but practically the rest of the world believes is horrible. That’s not an overstatement.
Especially if you were a member of the Nazi Party, which was formed on this date in 1920.
What exactly is a Tootsie Roll? It’s chocolate, but why doesn’t it melt unless put under extreme conditions? It isn’t delicate like a caramel, yet it won’t wrench your teeth out of your jaw like a salt water taffy. Could it possibly be alien technology, stretching its wispy tendrils into our candy-loving history?
Nah. That’s silly.
We’ve always wondered how the government would react when the invasion came. Would they tell us, so we could have a chance to hide or fight back? Would they simply allow it to happen, letting natural selection take its course? It’s a good question, one conspiracy theorists have pondered for years.
Here’s the funny thing.
It’s already happened.
This could be one of the most important days in pop culture history. Maybe, you should sit down and get something to drink. It is that monumental.
On this date in 1878, Thomas Edison, long may his name spoken before the gods, patented the phonograph. The world was never the same. That’s not hyberbole. That is a fact.
Sometimes you ask someone to do something and they scoff and say, “I’ll do that when cows fly!” And then you say, “Cows? I thought that was pigs. You’ll do that when pigs fly.” And the person says, “Pigs fly, cows come home. And I’m still not going to do that thing you want me to do, because of your poorly worded adynaton.” Then they take some of the Atomic Fireballs out of the shallow glass dish on your desk, and that’s not cool. You brought that candy from home.
Art has never been easy to define. America spent a lot of time viewing art under the Classical model. Everything looks as it should. Humans look like humans, dogs look like dogs. It’s an almost prim way of looking at art. It has its place. It’s rational, realistic and relatively normal. Everything is what you expect it to be.
On this date in 1913, all that changed.