Culture Gabfest - Station 2022
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 5 January 2022
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, the panel begins by breaking down just what makes HBO’s pandemic series Station Eleven so successful with Slate’s senior managing producer of podcasts and co-host of Slate’s Working podcast, June Thomas. Next, the panel appreciates the legacy that writer Joan Didion left behind. Finally, the panel rehashes the 2021 edition of Slate’s Movie Club (including Dana’s list of the year’s best films) while discussing the future of film.
In Slate Plus, the panel responds to Parul Sehgal’s article “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” in the New Yorker.
Email us at culturefest@slate.com.
Endorsements
Dana: The magical work of Swedish stop-motion animator Niki Lindroth von Bahr. Four of her animated shorts can be found on the Criterion Channel, but you can find one—The Burden—on Amazon Prime.
Julia: A recipe for Italian rainbow cookies adapted by Bon Appétit from Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone (of popular eateries Carbone and Torrisi Italian Specialties).
Steve: First, his monster music playlist of mellow deep cuts, which includes work from Rickie Lee Jones’ great ‘81 album Pirates, particularly the song “Living It Up.” Second: Susan Tallman’s criticism for the New York Review of Books as a whole, but particularly her recent review of Jasper Johns titled “The House That Johns Built,” inspired by a Johns catalog titled Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror.
Podcast production by Asha Saluja. Production assistance by Nadira Goffe.
Outro music is Freak Out! by Zorro.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gapfest Station 2020 edition. |
| 0:16.0 | It's Wednesday, January 5th, 2022. |
| 0:19.2 | On today's show, the post-apocalyptic novel Station 11 has been given a |
| 0:23.5 | lavish adaptation by HBO. It flashes back from a future depopulated by plague to our period now, |
| 0:30.5 | roughly. We will discuss with June Thomas. And then the truly incomparable Joan Didian,, essayist, novelist, screenwriter, has died. |
| 0:40.8 | How did so intimate a voice produce so incomprehensibly vast a legacy? We will try to do both of those |
| 0:46.9 | justice. And finally, I think it's really one of the funner landmarks on the cult gap calendar. |
| 0:52.5 | I love marking it off. The movie club. We discuss a year in |
| 0:55.4 | movies with Dana Stevens. Joining me today is Julia Turner, deputy managing editor at the LA Times. |
| 1:01.1 | Happy New Year, Julia. Hello, hello. Happy New Year. Yeah, great to hear you. And of course, |
| 1:05.6 | Dana Stevens, the film critic for Slate. Hey, Dana. Hey, hey, happy New Year. To you both. May it be a |
| 1:10.2 | better one. Yeah, |
| 1:11.3 | 2020 is the year that a great book about Buster Keaton was published if I cast my mind back to |
| 1:17.5 | before times. It was the one book that made it through the sieve of global pandemic. |
| 1:23.4 | And we all cling to it like a totemic, okay, anyway. Future civilization will base their political system on my book about Buster Keene. You could do worse. Can you give us the title of it? Absolutely. It is called Camer Man, Buster Keaton, the dawn of cinema, and the invention of the 20th century. And as everyone should be able to recite in chorus now, Steve, after your aggressive marketing efforts, it comes out on January 25th. All right. Well, the HBO |
| 1:45.8 | limited series, Station 11, is based on the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel's novel of the same |
| 1:53.0 | name, I should say. It takes off from a depressingly relevant premise that a global pandemic flu has |
| 1:57.7 | wiped out 99% of the human population. The world consequently goes dark. |
| 2:02.6 | Electricity and running water are bygone relics of the before times. In its place are small |
| 2:08.5 | subsistence-level settlements between which roams a troop of players, actors traveling the |
| 2:14.3 | perimeter of Lake Michigan performing the works of Shakespeare. The lead |
| 2:18.3 | actress and knife fighter extraordinaire is Kirsten, who flashes back to the night the pandemic |
... |
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