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The following podcast contains explicit language.

I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gap Fest. I normally have to be drunk off

my ass to do this edition. It's Wednesday, December 12th. On today's program, the indie movie,

Beasts of the Southern Wild, is it as darling as everyone claims it is? And then we're joined by Simon Dunin, who talks about the loathsomeness of the art world. And finally, Jody Rosen joins us to talk about Beck's new album, which is in fact not an album. It's sheet music. And yes, it's true. Dana and Jody and I are going to perform a song off of

the sheet music. Think the unthinkable. Sing the un-singable. All right, so Julia's out sick today,

joining me today is Slate's film critic, Dana Stevens. Hey, Dana. Hello, Steve. And filling in for

Julia is the editor of Slate's browbeat blog, David Hagland. Hey, Dave. Hey, Dana. Hello, Steve. And filling in for Julia is the editor of Slate's Browbeat blog, David Hagland. Hey, Dave. Hey, Steve. Thanks so much for pinch hitting. Thanks for having me. But before we dig into this show, Dana, we have an announcement to make about our call-in, our first ever call-in show. So the week of Christmas, to do something a little bit different, and also because we're all going to be scattered to the winds and not sort of keeping up with current events for our show, as we usually do, we want you to help us decide our topics. So we're going to have a voicemail number where you can leave a question cultural or otherwise that you've always wanted to hear us discuss on the show and haven't, and we'll choose some questions to answer on the show for that day. So the voicemail number is 424-255-7-833. Again, that's 424-255-7-8-33. So think it through,

leave us a question, and hopefully we'll get to it on the Christmas Week show.

Thanks, Dana. So Beast of the Southern Wild is an indie movie shot in 16mm down in the Louisiana Bayou. It takes place in a fictional

community down there called The Bathtub, and it focuses on a six-year-old girl named Hush Puppy

and her a very volatile relationship with her father, Wink. The movie won the Camera D'Or

at the Cannes Film Festival, and it also won the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. It's now available on streaming. Dana, as per usual, as per in-house policy, I have not read your review of the movie. I don't know what you thought of it. I just saw it. I have a ton of things to say. But first, I'm curious to hear. What did you think of this film? Well, first of all, I probably saw it longer ago than anyone in the room, so you guys are going to have to refresh me on some of the details of the movie, but I have a very conflicted relationship with this movie. I'm not rapturous about it. I would say that my review was a negative review in general, but there are a lot of things that I admire about Beasts of the Southern Wild. I admire the ambition and the scope of the project. So essentially, the story of the making of this movie is one of the most interesting parts of it. It's a collaborative project. Ben Zitland lives down there in New Orleans and did a lot of research into the communities that he was sort of fictionalizing and mythologizing for the movie. But there's a lot of sort of anthropological research behind it as well. And so the entire cast of the movie was also

its crew. Most of the actors are non-professionals. In fact, the guy who plays Wink, the father, he's one of the main characters in the movie, was actually a baker who was selling donuts to the crew. And they started talking to him and got to know him and said, hey, do you want to play the father in our movie? So there is that sort of artisanal homemade feel to the whole thing. The set, some of which are quite intense.

There's a floating raft that we'll get to when we talk about the story of the movie that was all built and created by the members of the cast. And so I do love that whole side of it, that there's a kind of a let's put on a show kind of creativity to the whole thing. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it hangs together as a movie. And we can get into what some of the problems were, but I find that this movie is a little bit voyeuristic in its kind of anthropological interest and that there's a lot of noble, savage stuff going on sort of behind the scenes and the way that this white director portrays this black community. I'm not saying that there couldn't be a white Jewish director from Queens who could make a great movie about black people in New Orleans, but there's

something going on in his idealizing gaze upon these raucous exuberant inhabitants of the bathtub,

...