This Slate's Spoiler Special is meant to be played after you see the movie being discussed.

The podcast contains explicit language.

Hi, this is Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, and I'm here with the Slate's spoiler special podcast on Drive, the new thriller with Ryan Gosling, directed by Nicholas Winding Ruffin, and John Swansberg here in the studio with me.

Hey, John.

Hey, good to be here.

Slate's Culture Editor.

And we just stepped out of this movie a few hours ago.

I was inquiring before we started to tape whether your adrenaline has come down in the few hours since we saw the movie because it's pretty intense.

I'm still feeling somewhat shell-shocked from this film, although I think the feeling I'm having now is slightly different. When we both walked out of the movie, I think we were both kind of like our hands were clammy and we felt a little bit on edge. And now I still kind of

feel that I'm in the moment or still reacting to the movie, but it's almost like more of a queasiness.

I keep having these flashbacks to some of the goryer scenes that happened in the second half of the movie that were really affecting.

Well, let's, I can't wait to get to spoiling some of those gory scenes and we'll work out

some of the PTSD together.

I hope so.

Let's do a quick plot summary first.

What do we need to know before we go into our spoilage here?

So drive is a movie about a driver, played by Ryan Gosling, who's only known as driver.

We didn't actually figure that out until we'd walked out. What was that character's name? Yeah, he has

no name, and that's handled really well. You don't really notice the elision of any name until I think

you started thinking about it. Because that can be kind of an artsy device in a movie, the

nameless character, but it is actually really well integrated, and it didn't really occur to me at the time. But yes, he's this nameless, suitably nameless, because he's sort of a type like the samurai,

you know, that Alain de Lo movie, Le Samurai.

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