Can men actually be friends? Jett puts the question to Gareth, his co-host and possible friend, on TFT’s 300th episode. Mountainhead and Tim Robinson’s Friendship become entry points into masculinity, status, loneliness, Emerson, Joseph Beuys, RoboCop, Starship Troopers, and whatever friendship is when nobody is trying to win.
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You know, Gareth, I know that I'm a limited man, but I don't know if men can ever really be friends. Do you know what I mean?
A limited edition man, I think some of us would say.
Well, there's only one of me.
Thank goodness. No, that's terrible.
That's terrible.
I don't.
Oh my goodness, Gareth, friends, sinners, listeners, all. Apparently, it's our 300th, depending on how you want to cut it, how you want to check it, our 300th episode.
I cannot wait to talk about the nature of friendship and the film friendship and Mountainhead, which is also about friendship, on this 300th episode of TFT, The Film Talk. I'm Jett Loe.
I'm Gareth Higgins. The conversation never ends. I have to say, what I said at the top of the show didn't come out right.
I was trying to say, there's so much of you to love that.
Oh boy.
It would take a lifetime to exhaust, it would take a lifetime to exhaust, which is actually what I think about all.
Or 300 episodes.
All human beings, most of us have an ego problem of our egos being deflated, not inflated. So let us begin this 300th episode with a declaration of the power of friendship. I'm sitting here mere minutes from where we first met 19 years ago.
And all the things that have passed since then, long-term listeners will know this has been one of the epic relationships in the world of making culture. I think you'd agree, Jett.
Well, it's been a journey.
It's been a journey indeed.
And dear listener, if you want to journey into the heart of almost everything that's wrong with the world today, you should watch Mountainhead, written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, the creator of Succession, a biting, I think the word is
carskating. Is that the word? A carskating satire of the tech bro world in which four guys get together for what appears to be, I guess it's their annual gathering. They get together, they have a guys weekend, they connect with each other.
Only these four are our fellas with a few billion dollars, in the case of three of them, to throw around, and concerns that don't look like the rest of us. And I believe we have a clip.
We do have a clip, folks. This is basically maybe the first 40 seconds or so of the trailer. A bunch of tech bros bantering, bantering with each other.
And here's a little pro tip, Gareth, their listeners. The secret here is that all these people are terrible. Let's listen in.
I hope you rich folks don't mind slumming it and the humble abode of the poorest billionaire in the gang.
But this is exactly why I built Mountainhead.
Look at this place, Supes.
Thank you. No, no, I just said, look at it.
No compliment implied.
Simply look at it.
Here we go. All right.
Four Presidents of Tech, get your net worth off.
Feels good.
220 Bill.
Guys, is this on every channel?
There have been a number of occurrences since your launch. UN officials are now openly attributing the recent uptick in ethnic tension to powerful new generative AI tools unveiled last week on Tram.
I just want to say this is not on you, Venice.
Obviously it's not on me.
Why would you even say that?
Now, dear listener, I do want to say that from here on out, there will be spoilers. And so if you want to see Mountainhead without spoilers, watch it in the US.
It's on Max, which I don't think has been rebranded as HBO Max yet, but it's going to be at some point.
They're going to call it HBO-ish.
So and if you want to hear spoilers, you're going to get some. Here's what I think about Mountainhead, right? I like I like Succession.
I like Jesse Armstrong. There is like there is this biting thing. There's also a sense of humanity in it because despite the fact that these people are terrible, if they're just terrible, it's not interesting to me.
If Macbeth is just terrible, then the guy deserves our pity. If you're born terrible, maybe you need to be kind of reigned in a bit. But if it's somehow genetic.
Do you think people watch Macbeth?
Some of these folks watch Macbeth and they're rooting for Iago basically, right?
Well, Iago is not in Macbeth. So that would be interesting.
Iago.
Wait.
Iago. Are you talking about Iago the parrot in Aladdin or Iago the person behind the downfall?
Othello. He's right. It's Othello.
Sorry.
That's all right.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Is it snobbish for me to say Iago is not in Macbeth?
In the Shakespeare Shared Cinematic Universe, maybe Iago kind of, you know.
I think there is a post credit sequence in the first folio of Macbeth that reveals Iago was behind it all along. OK.
So if if you're born venal, there's not much for the rest of us to learn other than how, you know, how do you respond to people who can't, in a sense, who can't help themselves.
Obviously, they need to be restrained in one way or another from from doing harm. But it's much more useful, much more interesting and I also frankly think more honorable to look at the humanity of people who do terrible things.
It's too easy to just caricature the tech bros.
It is not just it is a cliche to say, let's find out what caused the pain in the first place, but it is actually the underpinning value, not just of all good therapeutic work, all good relational work, but all virtual wisdom.
So the four characters here played by Jason Swartzman, Steve Carell, Corey Michael Smith and Rami Youssef, each one of them has a little glimpse of humanity. One is scared that his girlfriend is cheating on him behind his back.
One is so lost in his own, I don't know, sociopathy, that I couldn't not feel sorry for him. And one-
You're a nice person.
Well, so are you. To be a person, to be a fully integrated person-
I'm not there yet.
I'm trying.
Episode 400, I'll get there...
. means to risk stepping into the interdependence of all human beings. And the problem with these guys is they think they can lord it over all of us.
But one of them, it's a smart move on the part of Jesse Armstrong, one of them is dying. One of them is dying and there's two doors he can go through at this point.
He can face his mortality and his vulnerability and then discover actually, as a lot of people do, that what matters most is relationship and allowing yourself to be carried by others.
Or he can risk destroying the world in the vain hope that some kind of technological fix will allow him to be uploaded to the cloud. There's something I want to say about uploading to the cloud. I'm going to come to that later.
But this film is, it's a little indulgent. It's a good play, as it were. It would work well on stage.
But I'm not sure that I learned much beyond sort of seeing the kind of cartoonish, ugly cartoonish detail of what some of these folks may or may not be like in, in real life.
I think there's importance of art that illuminates our lives. Current situation. And for me, this film really illuminates the world that we're out, that we're living in now.
And I appreciate and I expected this because I've known you a little bit, just slightly after doing 300 episodes. I thought you would have the ability, whether it's innate or if it's practiced or combo of both, right? Nature vs.
Dirture to find that little tiny scrap, that little minuscule part of the humanity in each of these characters. Because I think most people who watch this film are not going to have that experience.
Most people I know who have watched this film really do not like this movie because it's an unpleasant watch. Doesn't mean it's a bad film.
I have spoken to several people who conflate the unpleasantness of the characters with the fact that, oh, this is a bad film. And it's not a satire on the level of Dr.
Strangelove or Four Lions or The Death of Stalin, but I think it illuminates our current situation. And the fact is, I'm watching and reminded of the Robocop versus Starship Troopers, not debate, but different ways of making a film, right?
They're both made by Paul Berhoeven, some of the same scriptwriters working on it and fun behind the camera.
And in Robocop, you have a character Murphy, he's the moral center, so he can live in the satirical world in which everyone is terrible, but he's an anchor, whereas in Starship Troopers, you realize after a while watching it that there is no moral
center, because everybody is terrible. They're actually living like in a fascist future. And it's the same way with Mountainhead, right? It's that these people are, again, I appreciate you found a little bit of, a little kernel, that kernel of love.
That's what makes you, Gareth Higgins, for each one of these characters. But these people are through their actions. I can't speak to their inner lives necessarily, these fictional characters, but they're external actions.
Their actions are appalling.
Absolutely appalling.
And I think it's really, the thing that's so horrifying watching, and you sort of feel, well, these people are delusional. I think they could end nation states to do this.
But then you realize, oh no, they do have the power to do all sorts of terrible things. And this is what is happening in the world right now, right? I have people I know whose research has been stopped, these scientists that I know.
It seems to be, and as insane as this sounds, dear listener, it seems to be because one scientist has the word transform in a paper and then the algorithm, the simpleton algorithm launched by simpletons says, oh, the word trans is in there,
therefore, we're cutting off the research. I know someone that has dedicated her life to STEM education, helping young people learn about science and get in the field. She's a researcher herself and her attitude now is like, why am I bothering?
This person is an inspirational figure and now she's so upset and angry, she's like, why did I bother becoming a scientist? So this is a real thing that's happening.
So I think Mountainhead is valuable for placing this in front of us and saying, look, look at this, look at what is happening because this is what is going on.
Well, absolutely. Maybe the word is amoral. These guys don't care about the impact of their actions.
They don't even pretend to care. One of them seems to care and goes through a horrendous ordeal at the end of which is willing to, I mean, it's an ordeal that leads to a deal and nothing in the end matters.
It's a disturbing film in that sense, but here's the thing I want to say about uploading to the cloud.
Okay. The consciousness, one character wants to upload his consciousness to live forever in the cloud.
That's right. That's one way to live forever. It hadn't occurred to me before.
There's an almost so uncanny as to be almost planned. One might even move toward thinking that there's a kind of a cosmic joke behind this. And that is, all spiritual wisdom teaches that the inner life is at least as important as the externals.
And there is a, I mean, probably the thing I enjoyed the most about Mountainhead is that one of these four guys who are destroying the planet has gotten rich off a meditation app. Slow zone, which I'm assuming is is slow for short for slow zone.
Slow it down. Slow it down. And learn how to appreciate things.
Look around you.
That's right.
Step away from technology by using this technology.
Here's the thing.
Here's the thing.
I'm I'm so in expert, not an expert, so in expert, a meditator and so in expert at contemplative spirituality that I almost don't know that I that I should say that there's no such thing as an expert meditator, as an expert in contemplative
spirituality. In fact, the people who go deepest with that are probably the ones who feel that they have the most to learn.
But one of the things that I think I might have sampled or tasted, I've certainly been around people who are practiced deep meditators and deep in the world of contemplative spirituality, is that authentic meditation always leads to acts of service
to the vulnerable and to the common good. And so when I see, I haven't looked at a whole lot of the meditation apps that are out there, but when I see a kind of culture of, let's call it mindfulness as a brand or mindfulness in inverted comms, I
actually have some hope for the people who practice that because it will come to an end by itself because it will be shown not to work or it can have the unintended consequence of Jason Schwartzman thinks he's doing meditation in order to make money,
I appreciate your optimism.
No, I'm not predicting a happy ending for these characters.
I am saying that the commodification of contemplative spirituality is a contradiction in terms because it will either not work or it will lead you to do the very thing that the people who are making money out of it don't want you to do, which is to
care for other people. Look up from your life enough to care for other people enough to perhaps stop using the app.
Then you cancel your subscription. Therefore, the thing is it's the same model as dating apps, right? Because if they actually work and lead to commitment, then you stop using the dating app.
So they can't actually work that well. So a meditation app can't work too well because then as you say, the person might achieve enough enlightenment or awareness to stop using the app.
Sure. And it's not to say that nobody behind the actual meditation apps that are out there cares about the common good.
The same is, you know, I'm sure there are some people, at least some people who used to work for Facebook that were primarily interested in helping bring people together.
But the thing about the cloud is there's a thing in contemplative spirituality called the cloud of unknowing. And there's a biblical term called the cloud of witnesses.
And the reality of what meditation actually is, is it is already uploading you to the cloud, to the ineffable cloud. The Steve Carell character could change his life around right now. If he decided to just let nature take it.
It's not to say he shouldn't get treatment, but the writing's on the wall for old Steve's character. He's not going to survive this illness that he has.
And I end, that's why I ended up being less angered by these characters and more pitying them, because there is a way in which people living behind those kinds of walls are only in a kind of a robotic or an industrial relationship with their own
Yeah, again, but the problem is the effects, like we were talking about just a second ago, like the effects they have on all of us.
Because in the film, one of the pieces of technology run by the world's richest man, we can imagine who this is an analog for, is creating so much AI out there that society is going into horrible violence. And this again is happening in real time.
And again, I appreciate you feel pity for these people.
But I'm not saying get up the guilting. You can love someone and still think they should be stopped.
Well, what did Jodie Foster say when she was asked about Mel Gibson? And how could you still be friends with Mel Gibson?
She said, well, you know, if my son robbed a 7-Eleven and I found out I would turn him in, well, I would still visit him in prison every week.
Is that what she said?
Yes. You know, we just had these marches. Here's the thing, Gareth, dear listeners, Senators, friends, all, we just had these big marches, hundreds, thousands of individual protests across the country protesting the actions of President Trump.
And I was watching some clips and I realized that things have become so devalued and toxic. As a default, I can't say that anything I saw was real. There was one 18-year-old girl reading the American flag making an incredible comment.
And my first thought was, this is so perfect. Is this AI? Is this the world that they've gotten into?
Everything has become devalued, which kind of makes you think about, again, we're going to talk about friendship, talk about the friendship of these characters. These characters are ostensibly friends or they're, they're frenemies.
And what is the nature of friendship here for these folks? Is there such a thing as genuine friendship? And that's my segue into friendship.
Your segue of friendship with An Uppercase F, which is the film directed by Andrew DeYoung, starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd.
I want to say, dear listener.
Are you and I friends?
Are you and I?
Are we friends?
You and me? Of course we are.
Well, but here's the thing. Wait, hold on. I'm thinking about the frenemies or competitors in.
We're neither frenemies nor competitors.
Hold on.
In Mountainhead, like these people are ostensibly friends and it's like horribly toxic. And then friendship we're going to talk about. But here's what I realized doing the show with you, Gareth.
My whole life, whenever I have a male friendship, my, the impulse is, this is from the time I was a kid, I'm talking about like six, was to put the friendship in a situation of an artistic product.
So I'm like a kid, I'm like six or seven and there's a friend of mine next door, kid, Jared Awica. And so we start putting on plays. You, I become friends with you.
What did we do? We create this podcast. Same thing with Wayne Van Rye.
I created another show called Letter to America. Another guy called Damien Willis created a show called Saturday Club. And I'm thinking, then is this real friendship or this is just a way to control it?
Because now I'm producing some sort of product. So this is what I'm saying. I'm not sure if I can I be your friend?
I don't know. I know this is a way to segue into friendship. The movie.
I mean, I have so many questions.
I have so many questions. I have so many questions. What do you, when you're drifting off to sleep at night and I cross the radar of your mind, what?
It doesn't happen.
Oh, well, that sounds terrible.
As you know, as you know, as you know, as a man of letters, Emerson said a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. And I think co-creativity among friends is actually one of the marks of it.
Some people, the artwork that they produce with their friend is the cumulative conversation that they have over decades sitting at a bar together. So I think don't overthink what you've done to your friendships.
I think it's also important to recognize if there's a part of you that wonders, have you been exploiting this friendship for monetary gain? The answer to that question is after 19 years, decidedly no.
What I was going to say, dear listener, before the clip for Friendship is, and I don't want to break your heart, Jett. I know you're a big fan of Sinners. But Friendship thus far on this date, the middle of June 2025 is my film of the year.
This is a satire that certainly belongs in the same family as Dr. Strangelove.
It is so sharp and so full of humanity about that these two guys who can't get it together, and actually through terrible adventures, let's call them terrible adventures, and terrible mistreatment of each other.
And there are behaviors that both of them indulge in here, that they need to be somewhat accountable for. And there are some people that they owe some amends to. But ultimately, what is revealed between them is a kind of love.
And I believe we have a clip.
We do have a clip. This is another extract from the trailer. It's about the last half of the trailer.
The Tim Robinson, our ostensible hero of this film, new friendship with neighbor Paul Rudd's character, seems to start off fine. Then it starts to spiral off the rails. The thing spiral off the rails, goes off the rails.
It spirals and goes. Let's listen in. And the view is gorgeous.
Look, we had a couple of really nice hangs.
But I think it's best that we go our separate ways. I don't wish to continue this friendship.
You all accepted me way too fast, you can't do that. You made me feel too free. People need rules.
All right, that's Friendship.
Yeah, as Gareth said, listen, folks, this is an hysterically funny film, and it's headed, fronted by Tim Robinson, who is kind of like Sui Ganares. Like, he's so one of a kind, so unusual, and yet so instantly understandable and definable. Oh, yes.
That he propels this film to a different level. He did a TV show called I Think You Should Leave, which is hysterically funny, and I'm sure there's knocks on this film. This is just a series of sketches from that show.
And that works too, but there's also a narrative through line for it that works.
I'm a little surprised that Gareth just talked about Paul Rudd, because for me, I kind of wonder, do you ever see Boyhood, Richard Linklater film, that we talked about that on the old show? Great movie, right? And here's the thing watching Boyhood.
There's a lot of time spent with Ethan Hawke and Rosanna Arquette, or I'm sorry, Patricia Arquette. And it's kind of made you wonder why is the film called Boyhood? It should be called Life or something.
Well, because it wasn't produced under the name Boyhood. It was going to be called 12 Years, because they shot over 12 years. But then they realized, oh, marketing.
It's coming out at the exact same time as 12 Years of Slave, the great Steve McQueen picture. So we got to change it, change to Boyhood. And that's kind of how I feel about Friendship.
I'm kind of wondering, should this be called Friendship? It could almost be called Marriage, because the film does sort of almost forget.
If you believe the film is called Friendship and it's about the dynamic, it leaves Paul Rudd, almost forgets about Paul Rudd for whole sections of the movie. And we have the adventures of our Tim Robinson character with his wife.
With his wife Kate Mara.
Yeah, I'm wondering if it should be called Friendship, because her thing is the impetus. She's the one that pushes Tim Robinson into the relationship by saying, Oh, you know, you need a buddy.
So it's sort of making commentary about the nature of marriage there.
She suffers the most as a result. But I think you could also see the fact that, I mean, Paul Rudd is certainly a supporting character in this film. But that's part of the point is he's the golden goose.
He is the elusive guy who's one or two steps up the scale of aspirational masculinity. And so it makes sense that he's not in it as much. And it's not...
It's also marketing, the reason you see it where it's Paul Rudd's face plastered because he's more marketable.
Yeah, because he's more famous. So maybe he was again filmed under a different title.
Sure. Well, I did want to say when I saw it, I thought it's like Planes, Trains and Automobiles directed by Werner Herzog. And you've got so much happening here.
That is, I don't know, you call it nasty funny, cold funny, but never uncomfortable. And uncomfortable because the desire in this, it's just about the desire for connection. It's about the desire to be seen, which I've probably mentioned in the show.
Before I learned from Peter Gable, the legal scholar, not Peter Gabriel, the magnificent musician Peter Gable.
You're past the bar.
I'd like to read a John Gresham thriller about Peter Gabriel. But that aside, Peter Gable...
Is it called Sledgehammer? The airport thriller.
Mike Sledgehammer.
Only Sledgehammer Gabriel can crack the case using his wide variety of skills. Also he's got his claymation buddies there.
I don't know what to say other than don't give up the day job, the day job, Jett, the day job. The uncomfortable humor.
Peter Gable, wonderful legal scholar, co-founder of the extraordinarily important piece on Justice Spirituality magazine, Takun said that, in addition to food, water, air and shelter, the most important human need that usually goes unmet is the need
for mutual recognition. And in societies where people feel like they see each other, where there's some cohesion there, you don't have to agree with each other. You don't have to like the same things, but you validate some sense of common humanity.
Obviously, those are more stable societies, easier places to live when there's a sense of interdependency and care for each other. That's what these care... Well, that's what Tim Robinson wants.
And the thing that makes this film a cut above is it turns out that's also what Paul Rudd wants. And I don't want to spoil, I'm not going to spoil this part of it, but the dénouement...
Is this the first time that the word dénouement has been used in the 300 episodes of The Film Talk?
No, I know I've said it several times.
You've said it? It's maybe the first time I'm saying it.
That's quite possible.
My dénouement is being proved. At the dénouement, it turns out Paul Rudd wants that mutual recognition just as much as Tim Robinson does and it's in the area of shame. I think it's one of the best visual jokes I've seen in a long time.
And it's perfect comedy. You've heard me say before, I think one of the hardest kinds of films to make is a comedy about real life.
Something that's kind of funny, funny, funny, funny, but also has some reality in there to Tutsi is the, or was the gold standard until I became more conscious of the elements of Tutsi that would now be perceived as transphobic.
But Friendship is up there for me. This film has something to say. It touched me at the end of 90 minutes of extremely uncomfortable laughter.
Well, you know, I'll just end on this.
I agree with everything you've said and I think one of the reasons it works, and this is a little teaser for our next show, we're talking about the Phoenician scheme.
One of the reasons why this film works for me is that it does, in addition to the uncomfortableness and dealing with issues of shame and how do we ever interact with somebody else with any sort of sense of decency, there is old classic filmmaking
techniques that shot very naturalistically. Notice how first time we see Paul Rudd, his face is obscured by a lens flare, so it's full of little cinematic stuff.
Also think about how there's a whole subplot about secret tunnels under the city and where do they lead? They lead to a place of political power, city hall.
There's a sense of secret knowledge of men being initiated into a space of then having power and be able to look over city. My point here is that all that really works.
When you have a scaffolding like that, and this is one of the reasons, again, teaser that I love the Phoenician scheme so much is because it has a narrative scaffolding that allows the other work to go through. I think that's really important.
Well, I'm glad we both love this film, and I'm hoping, I'm going to have to go back when I edit this show and listen to it, hoping that there's some pro tips on Friendship from Gareth that apparently I think will make me feel better what could be an
You're the Joseph Beuys of Beuys?
Well, how do you know I'm not talking about the other Joseph Beuys?
The guy that worked with Peter Gabriel in the thrill. You know, Joseph Beuys, listeners, if you're not familiar with him, he was this amazing German artist. You know, as a kid, I met him.
B-E-U-Y-S?
B-E-A-U-Y-S, I think.
I could be wrong.
Hold on, did you meet him when he was wrapped up in a rug?
No, I met him. He threw a T-shirt at me when I was about 11 at the Documenta Art Festival. I mean, that can't be true, right?
But that's how I remember it. I didn't know he was Joseph Beuys. He was this guy in this weird hat.
And then I had the T-shirt and it was Joseph Beuys Institute.
It is Beuys. I just Googled him to be sure of the spelling of his name.
If you look at him, dear listener, first of all, the headshot that Google has for him on the first page of Google results makes it makes him look like the product of a genetic splicing between Peter Weller and Walton Goggins.
And Jett, I'm going to invite you to Google that image right now and see if you are in alignment with me. And the other thing is he died on my birthday, my 11th birthday, and you were 11 when you met him. Oh, what could it mean?
What could it mean?
Sometimes, you know, a derail is just a derail. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. Listen, we got it.
We got to start wrapping this up. Again, we teased our next episode is going to be the the Phoenician scheme, which I'm curious. Gareth hated it.
Initially, I think he's made me change his mind. We're going to see. I hate.
We'll save it for the show. We'll save it for episode 301. I just want to take a second here.
I'm going to be serious and say, I'm not that, like I said at the top of the show, I'm not that self-aware. I'm a very limited person, very limited person.
Limited edition.
But God bless you. But I do want to thank you for your friendship. We've been doing this show for years.
This latest reboot of the show, there's been, and this is deliberate, there's been no marketing, right? So it's just been sort of under the radar. And now we have to make the decision whether or not we're going to market it.
But I hope we do, because if for me, in my strange, bizarre, labyrinthine, is that a word, understanding of male friendships, I would, if we continue to do the show, continue to be a friend.
And if we stop doing the show, I don't, our communication would be less. So I hope we still do it. Folks, don't forget that we're-
Hold on.
That's a really good idea for a Kickstarter campaign. Keep this friendship alive by funding the podcast. Wow.
That's up there with the new Trump phone.
It's going to be a big hit. Folks, don't forget, if you want to support the show and our friendship, you can go to patreon.com/thefilmtalk. We're on Facebook at The Film Talk.
You can email us info at thefilmtalk.org.
I'm going to finish by saying, dear listener, that Jett, as River Phoenix says in my own private IDO, I'd be your friend even if you didn't pay me. And that's been the 300th episode of The Film Talk. I have indeed been Gareth Higgins.
And I've been your friend, Jett Loe.
We'll keep talking.
Next time.