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Michael and Us

PREVIEW - #223 - Whose Cube Is It Anyway?

Michael and Us

Luke Savage and Will Sloan

Tv & Film

4.6668 Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2021

⏱️ 4 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Patreon Episode - https://www.patreon.com/posts/49602781 The latest Superdelegate selection is the Canadian cult classic CUBE (1997), in which a handful of people need to find their way out a mysterious, deadly structure comprised of many identical cubes. The structure is, of course, a metaphor for our society, but what, exactly, is its ideology? We offer a theory. PLUS: the return of Godzilla, Luke's days as a child actor, and why the Biden years will be The Era of the Mods.

Transcript

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0:00.0

There's a way in here, so there's got to be a way out.

0:02.4

Do you think they go to all the trouble to build this thing if we could just walk out?

0:05.8

The whole point of it seems to me that the cube can be whatever you want it to be.

0:10.4

If you were a nihilist and believe that life is meaningless, it can be that.

0:14.5

Or you can believe that the government did it, or you can believe that an eccentric rich guy did it.

0:19.4

Would you agree, or do you have a particular reading of it?

0:22.1

Well, I don't know.

0:22.8

I think I do have a particular reading of it, although I suspect heavily inflected by other

0:29.0

things I've been thinking about recently and which we were just talking about at the start

0:32.8

of the conversation.

0:33.9

I'll just say the fact that like the cop character is the bad guy in the film is the one dimension of the plot where Natale really kind of puts his cards on the table. You know, he's he's an anti-authoritarian. He's for communal solidarity. Yeah, and cooperation, right? Because if they have just tried to figure things out at the start and all work together using their different skills, they would have had a better outcome and at least, you know, a few more of them

0:57.4

might have made it out or all of them might have even made it out. I think that message is pretty

1:01.2

indisputable. But I think my interpretation of the movie is a kind of synthesis of the two

1:06.4

poles of possibility we were discussing earlier. So poll number one being that the cube is a passive

1:11.1

system and poll number two that it's been designed for a specific purpose. I think I come down

1:16.2

somewhere in between. I mean, look, the cube, it can't be a passive system entirely. Taken

1:22.0

holistically, the cube cannot ultimately be a passive system because there's too much complexity

1:27.2

to it.

1:27.7

They clearly, Cube clearly shows evidence of design.

1:30.6

I mean, it's such a complicated system that there is a mathematical, a discernible mathematical

1:35.2

formula that governs how it's put together, how it operates.

1:39.6

Also, the very idea of putting booby traps into a room, like that's an ideological decision. That's saying

...

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