I put a spell on you.

Because of mine.

I've been in this particular mood when it comes to picking movies to watch these days.

Not so much for this podcast, but just in my off hours.

I'm looking for things that are slow, quiet, empty, and I mean

empty in a good sense. I mean, empty in the sense that they seem to have vast, empty spaces in

which you can, like, lie down and put your feet up. I've been looking for movies that are,

I'll be imprecise with this term, but existential.

Just this past week, I revisited a film that I hadn't seen in a while called The Passenger,

a movie by Michelangelo Antonioni, starring Jack Nicholson.

And in that movie, Jack Nicholson plays a reporter who's reporting on uprisings in Northern Africa. And the movie

begins where, you know, he's kind of lost in the middle of nowhere in this desert area in

Northern Africa. And he finds his way back to his incredibly small, shitty hotel where there's one other

guest, another white westerner, and the two of them have had some conversations, but they don't really know each other, and he finds that the other guest has died, and spur of the moment, he's like, well, what if I just switch identities with him? So he changes his clothes. He goes out to the hall and says, Mr. Locke in the other room has died. I'm Robinson, by the way. I'm not, I'm not Locke, I'm Robinson. Basically, you know, in the middle of this

vast expanse in the middle of Africa, there's no difference between these two men. And I think

there's something liberating about that for the Nicholson character. He's just leaving behind his

identity completely. Now, the further he gets away from that, the closer he gets to a city,

he starts to assume the actual identity of Robinson.

Because whether he's Locke, whether he's Robinson, it doesn't really matter.

When you get into the city, the role that you've played in society, the accumulated baggage that you have, starts to stick to you.

So he's just accumulated the other guy's baggage. But in classic

Antonioni fashion, very slow, a lot of scenes where not a whole lot happens, very beautiful in

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