89. Author Ethan Warren on Cultural Anxieties Permeating Our Entertainment in Works like 'Joe Pera Talks With You'

Ethan Warren, film critic and editor for the online film journal
Bright Wall/Dark Room discusses his 2018 article “I Can Whistle
With That: What the Stories of 2018 Show Us About Responding to
Despair,” which tries to grapple with our current moment of
anxiety, apocalypse, and despair and the ways that seeps into our
cultural entertainment. In this conversation with Tom Knoblauch,
Warren explains how this concept of despair was appropriate for
2018, but may have evolved since then into feelings of formless
anger and longing, as well as what that means for the
entertainment of 2021 and 2022. Warren also discusses his
upcoming book The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American
Apocrypha, as well as where Anderson fits into it all. 


Terror Management Theory originates in the book The Worm at the
Core: On the Role of Death in Life by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff
Greenberg, and Tom Pyszcynski.