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The Echoes Podcast dives into real-world questions about community, faith, and human connection. Guided by hosts Marcus Goodyear and Camille Hall-Ortega, each episode explores personal journeys and societal challenges with inspiring guests—from faith leaders and poets to social advocates—whose stories shape our shared experiences. Through conversations with figures like Rev. Ben McBride, who moved his family to East Oakland’s “Kill Zone” to serve his community, or poet Olga Samples Davis, who reflects on the transformative power of language, we bring to light themes of belonging, resilience, and the meaning of home.
From the creators of Echoes Magazine by the H. E. Butt Foundation, The Echoes Podcast continues the magazine's legacy of storytelling that fosters understanding, empathy, and action.
What story are you living right now? I've been thinking about The Truman Show. Truman is born into a reality TV show, and he slowly realizes that the world around him has been engineered. His wife is chosen for him. His fears are planned to keep him in line.
Marcus Goodyear:Someone else is controlling his story. Now, I'm not saying that our lives are literally staged. America is not the Truman Show. But so much of what we call normal is shaped by the movies we watched and the shows we stream, our feeds, even the stories we tell in our faith communities. Lately, it feels like different parts of our country are living inside very different stories, maybe incompatible ones.
Marcus Goodyear:We consume different media bubbles and we're formed into different people. So what do we do? How do we learn to notice the stories that form us? And can we really choose better stories for ourselves? From the H.
Marcus Goodyear:E. Bett Foundation, this is The Echoes Podcast. Today, our guest is Alyssa Wilkinson, writer, cultural critic, and a film critic at The New York Times. Her new book, We Tell Ourselves Stories, looks at Hollywood as an American dream machine and asks, What happens when that dream starts to splinter? We talk about movies, reality TV, and the stories that form us in faith communities, and we'll get practical about how to stay tethered to the truth while still letting story do its deep work.
Marcus Goodyear:I'm here with my cohost, Camille HallOrtega. Alyssa, welcome.
Alyssa Wilkinson:It's so good to be here. I'm so glad we can do this.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yes, we're so excited to have you.
Marcus Goodyear:So you talk about the Hollywood dream machine in your book. Can you explain what that phrase means to audience?
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yes. So first of all, you know, when you think about Hollywood, often it is the place where people see movies that tell them what they should want, or kind of what aspirations they have. And America has always been a very optimistic country. You know, you leave your home and you strike out across the country, and you're going to build a home for yourself and a new future. So that's part of the dream machine.
Alyssa Wilkinson:It's where those dreams are literally created for people and they get those ideas in their head. But there's also this other weird thing that happens when you watch a movie, which is that the actual physical experience of watching especially in a theater is very like a dream. You kind of go in this dark space, maybe you struggle to stay awake. You're watching this thing happen before you on a big screen for a couple hours. And it's, you know, and then you kind of wake up out of it, right?
Alyssa Wilkinson:And so you almost have this thing happen in your subconscious, and it sort of lodges somewhere. And it's not just you who had that experience. It's everyone who was in the room with you, and in any room where that movie was playing. So it's like a collective dream. It's a collective subconscious, and we all have that experience together.
Alyssa Wilkinson:So Hollywood is a place where all of us are having our dreams manufactured. And in fact, the American movie industry has been a place where America has told itself stories about what it is. You know, who are we as a nation? What is our history together? What kind of a people are we?
Alyssa Wilkinson:And as the American film industry has exported its movies over time, that has, you know, been globalized. And a third piece of this, as I talk about a lot in the book, that over time, the American movie industry has kind of become the way that we process our real lives. So now, if I'm thinking about maybe going out and dating, I'm probably going to process a lot of my experiences through romantic comedies that I watch. Or if a war starts in part of the world, often we look at the footage and think of it in terms of movies we've seen. So we're actually like thinking about real events in terms of fictional depictions of those events.
Alyssa Wilkinson:So it's all kind of like acting back on itself and it's like a little factory where those dreams are created. So all of that, you know, I think is a way to think about what happens in Hollywood. And I don't think of that as necessarily a good or a bad thing. But it is something that is very important for us to be aware of when we're thinking about what the effect over the last century of the entertainment industry has been on the American century, but also on the world.
Camille Hall-Ortega:You're explaining that this is about 100 years old, this industry here in America. What substantive changes have you seen? Spoken about talked about realized over that time?
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yeah, so many. I mean, you just think back to 100 years ago. I mean, I was talking about this at work recently. 100 years ago, Buster Keaton's movie, The General came out. So that's 100.
Alyssa Wilkinson:That's a silent film.
Marcus Goodyear:So it's aged well, though. Buster Keaton is still good.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Aged incredibly well, and it's still a very influential film. But if you think about everything that's happened in the meantime, in the world and in the movies, we've got sounds, we've got color, we've got longer films, we've got digital. You know, we've had many different changes in what the audience wants to see. You know, do they want epics? Do they want sort of gritty realism?
Alyssa Wilkinson:Do they want, you know, the action films of the 80s? Do they want kind of the 90s comedy or that kind of thing? We've had superhero films, really crop up right after 09:11 when we're yearning for a hero. And then we have this whole other parallel thing that happens, which is the rise of television. And then of course, of the internet later and all of the things that that brought.
Alyssa Wilkinson:So we actually have a fracturing of the entertainment landscape where, you know, movies were kind of it for a while, then TV came along and kind of ate a big part of that. And so movies had to come up with a way to compete. And then, you know, and then, and they did, and they figured it out. But then, you know, there's new things that are always coming along. And one of the most interesting things about the movie industry is always that it's an art form that is equally married to commercial and technological changes, basically.
Alyssa Wilkinson:So it's never just one thing. And so every time a new technology comes along, changes. And they're always trying to they have to work with commercial interests. So all of those things are true. And on the flip side, it really has seeped into our sort of political and public culture as well.
Alyssa Wilkinson:You know, we in the 80s, we had an actual movie star who became president. But before that, Kennedy, they talked about in terms of movie stardom. And before that, actually Barry Goldwater, they talked about in terms of he looked like a movie star. So certainly just the feeling that we were watching our public life as entertainment was already happening long before the rise of anything current, but certainly anything, you know, decades ago.
Marcus Goodyear:Right.
Alyssa Wilkinson:So so many changes.
Marcus Goodyear:Well, even after Reagan, we had Clinton, who was sort of a performer.
Alyssa Wilkinson:That's right.
Marcus Goodyear:We had George W, who's like a cowboy. All of these different people adopting, not adopting, but having personas imposed on them that we recognize from from film.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yes. That's exactly right.
Marcus Goodyear:I want to want to go back to the idea of the dream machine. You've talked about it being fragmented. Do you think I have a two part question. Do you think it is broken in that it's no longer producing dreams for us? And do you think it's broken in the sense that it's no longer producing good dreams for us?
Alyssa Wilkinson:I mean, I don't think it's broken in the sense that one way to think about it, I had a colleague who used to say that a way to think about what it's doing is telling us what we're anxious about. And I'll give you this example. It's actually become kind of a joke among film critics right now that every movie AI is the villain, like even movies where you wouldn't think AI could be the villain. And this has become very, very, very true. I have seen two movies this week, where you would never think AI could be the villain and it was.
Alyssa Wilkinson:And I won't even say what they are.
Camille Hall-Ortega:I'm excited to ask you.
Alyssa Wilkinson:But I thought, you know, I walked into the movie and thought, there's no way this one, But yes, it actually was. So that tells you something, right? And it's not just that some studio executive is saying, well, you got to figure out a way to get AI in there, right? Because of course, the studio executives don't want AI to be the villain. They want to use AI.
Alyssa Wilkinson:It's just clear that we're all feeling the anxiety and we're trying to work it out together. And that, I think, is that's what we do in our dreams, right? If you're anxious about something, you go to pops up in some weird way in your dream. So there is that kind of subconscious thing that's happening.
Camille Hall-Ortega:You're referencing it a bit there, but I'm very curious because I imagine that in this conversation we'll talk a lot about sort of this dark side of that dream machine. But I'm also curious about the light side or the bright side there. Yes. What are the good things that come from aspirational views of movies?
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yeah, I mean, I think that there's so much right? There's been so many movies where people watch them and they see, for instance, a healthy friendship. I think friendship is one of those places that's especially true because there are movies that are full of examples of friends who support one another and are one another's most vital relationships. And that is something that often is very countercultural to the way that we talk about friendship in other places.
Marcus Goodyear:I see- Can you give an example of your favorite friendship?
Alyssa Wilkinson:Oh, my goodness. Well, now you're asking me a difficult question. I'm just thinking of like, there are there are plenty of movies that are sort of in
Camille Hall-Ortega:I would of in that My Girl, and then I'm like, oh, now I'm I feel a little bit sad.
Alyssa Wilkinson:No, I know. Well, there there. Yeah, there are a lot of those. I'm you can't ask me for examples off the top of my head. My brain is so cramped like movies all the time.
Alyssa Wilkinson:I know.
Marcus Goodyear:All right. You're just going to throw out Frodo and Samwise?
Alyssa Wilkinson:Oh, yeah.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Sure. Yes. The Lord of the Rings. Great. But yes.
Alyssa Wilkinson:No. But I mean, I think I think that often, you know, we're we're told that a friend can't be your your, you know, your person or whatever. And we see, you know, that, or, you know, I was, talking to, sometimes I'll talk to people and they'll say, Oh, there are no movies where you see clergy who are good. And I'll say, That's not true. There's actually quite a lot of them.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Know, that's- Which
Marcus Goodyear:is required by law.
Alyssa Wilkinson:There's quite a lot of them and there are current ones too. And so that, you know, there's a lot of these communities that pull together.
Camille Hall-Ortega:I'm thinking also just about representation. And I think that's a huge thing because we know even just from from data that when you see yourself in something, you believe more that that could also be you. Absolutely. So this aspirational view where we go, that wasn't always the case that we saw representation in film. But how wonderful that I can think about my kids watching a film like Hidden Figures.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yes. Knowing that even though it's telling a story that's from many, many years ago, it is being brought to light in a time where it is important that kids and adults alike can see themselves and go, I'm represented here in a way that allows me to aspire, sometimes uniquely where that might not have happened.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, really is. Yeah, you know, and there didn't used to be space in the industry for those kinds of movies. It really took a lot of pushing to just have people green light those kinds of projects because there was received wisdom that, oh, they won't do well at the box office. You know, as soon as people are proven wrong, then they start getting made.
Alyssa Wilkinson:And that's really wonderful.
Marcus Goodyear:I love this book a lot. I've read it twice, which is really that's very unusual for me to do that. And so when when somebody hears that there's a book about Joan Didion, they might be like, but that's I mean I
Camille Hall-Ortega:didn't know who she was.
Marcus Goodyear:I think But now I do. Embarrassed to say I didn't really either. I had just, like, heard the name, and I knew I recognized her face. But she is really the main character walking us through this this way of thinking about storytelling and this way of thinking about American storytelling specifically. One of the things she says, she talks about that telling the truth about what something is is what movies do.
Marcus Goodyear:So she there's one point where she talks about a Western that is not particularly a good movie, but it's a true Western. So she's like, I like it. That's a terrible paraphrase of your section. But I'm curious, what helps a person tell the difference in today's media between this idea of the truth of what something is and just the constant spin from every side that we're getting?
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yeah, I mean, it's hard, right? Because it's it's so many layers of of build up at this point of spin. It can be hard. I always think that there is a is a kind of intuition that you have when someone is not giving it to you straight. And I think one reason I really admire Didion as a writer, and if you if you read her directly, she has no tolerance for spin at all.
Alyssa Wilkinson:She just sees right through it. Later in her life, she became a political writer and it is just some of the most incredible political writing I've ever read. She considered herself a conservative basically through to the end of her life, but people almost don't realize it because she treated everyone exactly the same. And if she detected spin, she had no mercy. So it's really great to read her and kind of get that feeling.
Alyssa Wilkinson:We don't have a lot of writers like her anymore. And I think for her, it was very much about the language that people used. So she would see she would think about whether someone was using language to obfuscate the truth. Were they using jargon? Were they using what she thought of as pernicious nostalgia?
Alyssa Wilkinson:That was a phrase that she would use a lot. Were they? Was she being? Was she hearing sentimentalization in the language? Were people trying to tell the story of a golden age that never existed?
Alyssa Wilkinson:All of these things to her were an indication that something was not true. And I think that that for her was really important.
Marcus Goodyear:Alyssa, when people talk about spin, they normally are thinking about like media spin, journalism spin. And what I hear you saying is that through nostalgia, through all of these other things, we actually get spin within our narrative storytelling, our fictional storytelling. Can you talk a little bit more about that and and the role of what we're spinning to each other?
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, the question is, are we starting from the premise? Are we starting from the truthful premise of what was in the past and what is happening now? Like, you know, the cause and effect, really. That's what a story is. This happened and so this is happening.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Didion, when she wrote, We tell ourselves stories in order to live, that's what she's writing about is we she goes on to say, We look at a headline in a newspaper and we construct a story around the headline in order to comfort ourselves. So we see something scary happening and we try to come up with a reason for why it's happening in order to make sense of it. Because the world is full of scary headlines basically and it's completely chaotic to live in a world with disconnected headlines. And so we have to come up with a reason for it. But there's a danger to that because we can invent stories about why things happen in order to comfort ourselves.
Alyssa Wilkinson:They have no root or basis in the truth at all. They just are, you know, rooted and based in perhaps a dream that Hollywood told us, or perhaps a dream that we've inherited from a story we've been telling ourselves or our family or community tells about itself, that actually isn't based in fact, it's based in a half truth or something like that. And I love what Camille was saying about hidden figures, because that's a great example of going back to history and sort of taking the true story and telling it. You know, that story is really wild in some ways that I didn't know it. I actually studied computer science as an undergraduate, and I had no idea these women even existed.
Alyssa Wilkinson:In a way that history was hidden from me.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Why didn't I know to begin with? Why wasn't it a part of the canon of, you know, whatever the field or whatever? Exactly. That kind of thing.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yeah,
Camille Hall-Ortega:it's so important. Yep. I'm wondering, you have have spoken about how there can be sort of a war on creativity. I've seen it that this idea that we're almost drawn to divisiveness is one of the reasons you have said that being a film critic is important to you. Can you speak more about the importance of the work that you're doing and what you think it helps us with?
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yeah, I mean, can be counterintuitive to people, I think, because a lot of people think that being a film critic is about hating movies and tearing them down. So I think about this exactly opposite. And I would say that most good film critics or critics of any kind do too. So the job of a critic is to create a new work of art. First of all, that's what I think I'm doing when I write a piece of criticism.
Alyssa Wilkinson:I'm not saying it's always great art, you know, that's what I'm aiming to do. And what I'm doing is recording my encounter with a work of art so that my reader can have their own encounter with that work of art in a more rich and full way. Our world is full of this idea that you can either have this opinion or this opinion and one of them is correct. And one of the beautiful things about art is there isn't a correct opinion to have about a work of art ever. You might hate a movie and I might love it and neither of us is correct.
Alyssa Wilkinson:And also, you may also feel medium about it. We're all right. So if we can then talk about it, if we can have a conversation about it, then we're actually demonstrating something really interesting about human experience, which is that everybody brings themselves to the world with kind of the richness and fullness of who they are, their life, their experience, their perspectives. And we can civilly sit down and have a conversation about that. And in so doing, learn about one another.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Right? That's the beautiful thing that art gives us. Criticism, I think, is the first place that we can do that. Like I write a review. This is something that very often happens to me, especially since I got to The New York Times, just because a lot of people read The New York Times.
Alyssa Wilkinson:I write a review, I publish it. It happens every week. And then I'll get emails from people. And usually they're really nice emails. And they're just from people who are like, I read your review.
Alyssa Wilkinson:I went and saw the movie. Here's what I thought. And then they just want to tell me. And it's like literally we're having a conversation. We've connected.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Movie never gets off.
Marcus Goodyear:It's adorable.
Alyssa Wilkinson:I love it. You know, some of them, if I don't hear from them, I'll email them because I'm like, Are you doing Yeah, that it's
Marcus Goodyear:a chance to practice civil discourse, civil disagreement with lower stakes. Theoretically, I know that. Yeah, I know that it's only only a theory.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yes. Hopefully, you're not going to, you know, ruin a friendship over, you know, I liked that movie and you liked it less. Yes. Unless, you know, it's the Lord of the Rings.
Marcus Goodyear:Unless it's the Lord of the Yeah. I'm pretty sure my friends are tired of me talking about Tron as well. I wanna go back to this idea of criticism and how you understand the role of the critic. Before this conversation, I was thinking I mean, when I think of the ultimate critic, I think of Ego from Ratatouille. Ratatouille.
Marcus Goodyear:He's a restaurant critic, right? But, I mean, he's just such a perfect jerk. And he's so full of himself. I mean, name is Ego, of course. So on the one hand, I love what you're saying that we are learning to consume media perspective and sharing that perspective with others and hearing theirs.
Marcus Goodyear:On the other hand, when we share our own perspective, how do we not so fully own that perspective that we shut each other down?
Alyssa Wilkinson:Well, if you remember the film Ratatouille,
Marcus Goodyear:I do.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Glad you brought it up. It's actually the perfect example here because what happens at the end I mean, that is actually a film about criticism.
Marcus Goodyear:Right.
Alyssa Wilkinson:If you think about it, and you can tell because it ends with the critic. He tastes the ratatouille, and he's brought back to this memory of having ratatouille that his mother made when he was a child. And it totally transforms him. And he just, he thinks, oh, you know, everything has changed. Good food can come from anywhere.
Alyssa Wilkinson:It doesn't have to be this highly trained chef. And he says something like the new needs champions, right? And so the kind of moral of Ratatouille is that a critic is not someone who tears things apart. A critic is someone who looks for the good and champions it. And I think one way that I think about this is when I write a pan, which is like a negative review, it is usually because I have gone in looking for the good and have been disappointed.
Alyssa Wilkinson:C. S. Lewis wrote a little book called An Experiment in Criticism. I think he actually wrote it because he was getting bad reviews for the Space Trilogy, although I cannot prove this. But it's a wonderful book.
Alyssa Wilkinson:And he said something in it like we can only know if a book is bad if we start it expecting it to be very good, which I think is kind of a great line.
Camille Hall-Ortega:That's good.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yeah. And I think that changing our to use like Andy Crouch's line, I think changing our posture towards art and changing our posture when we're kind of writing about it or talking to our friends or however we're kind of practicing our criticism is the key. I'm not here to prove to you that I'm smart, or that like I have the best opinion or like the best taste. As a movie critic, I watch around 300 movies a year. Like hopefully, there are things that I can detect in a movie that maybe someone who isn't professionally obligated to watch that many movies might not.
Alyssa Wilkinson:And so that is my job. And I go to a visual art critic, you know, my friend who sits down the ends of the row for me, when I want him to tell me what shows should I be looking for? Like, I'm thinking I'm going to this, what should I be thinking about? Because not because he has better taste than me, but because he has a finely developed palette.
Marcus Goodyear:Yeah. You know, I think the suspicion of the media comes from this sense that the media has an agenda for us as we consume it. And at Laity Lodge, which is the adult retreat center that is affiliated with the H. E. Bout Foundation, we often say we have an agenda, but we don't have an agenda for you.
Marcus Goodyear:And that means two things. First of all, we don't hand out a physical agenda, so people don't necessarily know what's happening from hour to hour. But also it's a sense that we are who we are. We are bringing our beliefs to this work, and we invite you into that, but we don't need you to share it necessarily. We just need you to be with us and be open.
Marcus Goodyear:And last week at Laity Lodge, there was somebody talking about the media and its agenda for the good life, way the media tells us what we're supposed to believe. You referenced the good life earlier in this podcast already. And so I wanna just take a moment. This is Amy Julia Becker speaking last Thursday last Friday. So deep from the Lady Lodge archives talking about media.
Amy Julia Becker:Our culture is like a moving walkway, right, like in the airport. And so if you're like, oh, I don't necessarily want to be formed and shaped by it, so I'm gonna turn around. And what happens? Like you keep moving in the direction you don't want to be going unless you are like actively walking against it. And that's what's happening when our imagination is being shaped by the advertisements and images and assumptions that are coming at us all day long.
Amy Julia Becker:And so our imagination for the good life, I'd say, is primarily shaped by two different kind of realms of imagination. One is materialism. So that's kind of money, beauty, celebrity. So we might say in this version of the good life, the good life belongs to the Instagram influencers. The good life belongs to the pop stars or to the investment bankers, but we also have a kind of moralism good life, and that can come by way of like getting good grades or having good behavior or having good habits, right?
Amy Julia Becker:I eat a keto diet or I go to CrossFit or I give money away or I go to church or these are the ways that I am going to improve myself and know the good life.
Marcus Goodyear:What do you think, Alyssa? Do you I mean, she talks about two different versions of the good life there, but just the whole idea. I would love to get your take.
Alyssa Wilkinson:There's a essay I write about in the book that Didion published in The New Yorker, I believe in 2000, about Martha Stewart. And this is before Martha's before kind of the insider trading stuff happened. So it was when it was just when Martha Stewart was becoming a lifestyle brand and, and she was the original influencer really. She was the kind of the first person of her type to turn herself into a lifestyle influencer brand. And she was brilliant at it.
Alyssa Wilkinson:And Didion looked at her and saw a woman who had created a website. There's this error in the article of what is this web site that you speak of. She looks at it and she says, Why are they here? What are they interested in? Why are they commenting on these boards devoted to this woman who sits in her house in Connecticut and makes topiaries?
Alyssa Wilkinson:And she realizes that what she represents to people is actually a combination of what Amy Julia was saying there, which is like both an aspirational businesswoman who's kind of got it all together. And also, she has this beautiful life you know, that you just want to be part of and it's this aesthetic and she kind of combined the two. And in that way, she says she well, Didion, this is very Didion, but she kind of sees her as the apex of the pioneer woman of kind of American lore that she has the can do spirit, but she also is like the domestic goddess. And she says that's a story we are taught to want to tell ourselves as like American women of a certain she's talking about specifically her middle class white American women, but that's what we're supposed to want to be. But we see it replicated over and over and over again.
Alyssa Wilkinson:And I think advertising is the most powerful place that we see it. Because, you know, that's the job of the advertiser. I'm in the middle of a rewatch of Mad Men, which I haven't watched since it first aired. And it's really striking to me on this rewatch that so much of the show is about men trying to figure out what women want, so they can sell stuff to them, and slowly coming to realize that maybe women should be the ones trying to sell stuff to women. But you know, that that's tapping into the same thing that entertainment does.
Alyssa Wilkinson:And it's no surprise to me that the entertainment business and the advertising business have been slowly merging on one another for decades at this point, to the point where you don't know when you're being sold something a lot of the time, because they're packaged so tightly together.
Marcus Goodyear:Like little Reese's pieces set out for E. T. To follow.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yeah, exactly. I mean, E. T. Is such a funny one because there's actually Star Trek figurines in the background. Star Trek was like five years old at the time.
Alyssa Wilkinson:So it was, I think the first moment in movie history where merch from a recent movie showed up in a movie. Oh, wow. Yeah, kind of wild.
Camille Hall-Ortega:That's really cool. You're mentioning something that's making me think of a very hot topic, which topic you're talking about kind of when we are affected by something without even realizing it. And it's, of course, making me think of A. I. And we spoke a little bit about A.
Camille Hall-Ortega:I, but I think it's so important to dive in here because it's so top of mind for many of us.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yeah,
Camille Hall-Ortega:and just very timely. I read your piece in The New York Times about can we trust the documentaries that that we see? Yeah. And it was. Troubling and enlightening and so many things.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Can you just talk a little bit about how A. I. Is affecting the world of film and of documentary specifically? And you just speak a little bit to it in general.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yeah, I mean, it's so vast that it's hard to wrap our heads around because even the term AI covers so many different kinds of things. And it's also been kind of like retcons in a sense to cover things that weren't called AI in the past, but now they are so that people will invest in them. But in the article, I was talking specifically about AI video generators. I think at this point, a lot of people are aware that a lot of the video they see on Facebook, for instance, is not real. Like if you see a cat playing a flute, like that's not real.
Marcus Goodyear:Didn't happen. That was obvious.
Alyssa Wilkinson:But also, there's less obvious ones. And it's becoming easier and easier to, you know, mistakenly think that, you know, this video of maybe a priest yelling at law enforcement is real, but it's not real. And it can be harder and harder to discern this. And these videos are being created often to gin up rage basically for clicks because somebody is going to benefit from it. It's also just very easy to generate real looking video of normal things of historical footage or of just like somebody's living room or something like that of a house on a corner of a street.
Alyssa Wilkinson:And you know, there's no like harm done if you generate a picture of a house. Who cares, right? But in the documentary world, this is a real problem because your expectation, there's a level of trust that's expected by the viewer of a documentary that everything I see is real unless I'm told otherwise, or unless it's like a recreation and it's sort of visually indicated to me that these are actors, they're recreating something that happened. So it's very troubling when the possibility emerges that things you see in a documentary might not actually be real. They might be generated video.
Alyssa Wilkinson:And I was chatting with some folks at a documentary film festival who said, Oh, yeah, I mean, we can't really talk about it. But the big streamers have asked because they're trying to push out content super fast because there's such an appetite for it. Well, can't you just create that scene?
Camille Hall-Ortega:Oh gosh.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Which is troubling on many levels, but also, you know, no video just exists as a film anymore. It also is internet video, right? So you could clip out that clip and post it to the internet. And twenty years from now, somebody might just think that's real.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Somebody or AI.
Alyssa Wilkinson:AI. Right. Exactly. And so we're muddying the historical record on top of everything else. And we're already in a time where it's hard to know what's real.
Alyssa Wilkinson:But the fact that I really could, in ten years, not be able to trust a single video I see or next year or next month is very troubling. And if you think about all the ways that video is used to, you know, as evidence of human rights abuses around the world or things like that, this becomes very troubling. And there are governments around the world that will try to, you know, use that and sort of say, Oh, this is fake. This isn't actually happening. So that's what I was writing about.
Alyssa Wilkinson:It was, if you found that troubling, I was steeped in it for about six months and I was calling people who were like, Yeah, we don't know what we're gonna do. And there's a huge need for people to really be thinking about this and thinking about, you know, what kind of guardrails can we put out there? Because we should be caring about truth, right? That should be front and top of minds. And video evidence in court, it will not be a thing anymore.
Alyssa Wilkinson:That should matter to us if we care about things like truth and justice. So all of that is part of my job here, because obviously we care about it too a lot. And I think that AI is one part of it, but it is a really big part of it. There are lots and lots and lots of other ways that AI is affecting the movie business. Some ways, it's kind of a test case for the ways it's going to affect everybody's lives.
Marcus Goodyear:But so if we have somebody listening to this and they say, you're right, I don't actually know what to trust anymore in my feed. I thought that, you know, I thought possums dropped dead in a split second because it's so cute. This is one that I was taken in by. What what are some practices? What are some practices you can give us or do you that you do yourself to to help us focus on what is true, what is real and what is unfiltered or less filtered by these technologies that can just be so confusing?
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, some of it is, you know, skepticism. And we I think we as a culture have learned that in the sense that we learned it around photographs, right? We all became aware of photoshopping at some point and became aware One that shot
Camille Hall-Ortega:of three hands.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yeah. What's happening? We realized at some point that the covers of magazines probably had been photoshopped, right? We need to start doing the same thing with videos. And I'm hoping that we'll get there.
Alyssa Wilkinson:But we also need to be there are people who are out there who are doing the work to educate us on here are the telltale signs, right? So we need to seek those out, you know, and we need to look at them and we need to send them to our friends and our family and say, you should watch this. If our friends and our family are sending us videos and saying, isn't this cute? Know, sometimes you have to say, Yeah, but you know, this isn't real, right? And you know, it's sometimes it's a bummer to do that, but you have to do it.
Alyssa Wilkinson:I also see this thing happen, unfortunately, where people will post something, and people underneath will say, that's not real. And they'll say, yeah, but I like it. And they'll keep it up. We can't do that. Draw We a hard line and say, this isn't true.
Alyssa Wilkinson:I'm taking it down. And I'm going to make another post that says, I posted something I realized it wasn't true. Like, here's how I know. Because the more we're doing this, the more we're injecting truth back into the ecosystem instead of letting the lie be out there.
Camille Hall-Ortega:I was just going to say I know that we're overtime and I feel like we would be remiss if we don't note that at the time of this recording, the Oscars are just around the corner and sitting with us is a New York Times film critic. Can you just tell us what you're most excited about? Any things that you're really happy that the Nom list came out the way it did? Any of your favorites that you want to mention? Any just sad snubs that you've seen?
Camille Hall-Ortega:Tell us anything you'd like.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yeah, a couple things. Overall, I thought they were pretty good nominations this year, which I can't say every year, but I have thought the quality of nominations have been going up over the past few years. I hope that people think of the Oscars as kind of handing you a watch list and telling you like, these are really good movies. And if you haven't seen them, here's some good movies that you might want to see. You know, instead of being like, oh, they're out of touch with America or whatever, which is the story people like to spin.
Alyssa Wilkinson:I think, you know, these are movies picked by people who work in the industry, so they will have seen them and they're telling you, we think these are the ones that were best this year. I really like, you know, Sinners. I really like one battle after another. Think these are great movies, you know, and they're thinkers too. You kind of watch them and you keep thinking about them.
Alyssa Wilkinson:And that's exciting to me. And it was exciting to see Sinners in particular be a movie that was one of the most critically acclaimed movies of the year and one of the highest box office earners. That doesn't ever happen. Or rarely happens. So, that was really cool.
Alyssa Wilkinson:I was thrilled to see Delroy Lindo get nominated for his role in that film too. I have been rooting for that man for ages and I screamed on my couch at 06:00 in the morning when that nomination came out. So that was really exciting. I'll tell you one movie that did not make it onto the nominations list, but for some people might be something they might want to seek out is the movie The Testament of Ann Lee, which is about the founder of the Shaker religious group, which is the splinter group off the Quakers. It's a strange movie.
Alyssa Wilkinson:I will warn you. It's a very odd movie. But if you're into kind of odd movies about splinter religious groups, you really couldn't do it. One. My favorite show.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yeah. Also, I grew up near where the Shakers sort of landed when they came to America. And, you know, they have beautiful music and furniture and all of that. But it's really about the woman who founded the sect. She had very strange ideas.
Alyssa Wilkinson:But if you're kind of into like, strange seventeenth century religious groups, this is it's a great, great movie. Totally worth seeking out.
Marcus Goodyear:Well, thank you so much for that recommendation.
Camille Hall-Ortega:I told Marcus and our producer, Rob, before you were on the call that I have not seen a lot of the movies that are up this year. I am inspired to I love your your idea of this being kind of a list of things that you can can go and choose from. It's really helpful.
Marcus Goodyear:It's a menu, right? It's a menu at a good restaurant. And, you know, everything you order is going to be good and interesting. Yeah, You might like the chicken more than the fish. Am so excited to see Sinners on this list.
Marcus Goodyear:I love Sinners because it's somehow both very thinky, like you said, but also a popcorn movie. And Oh, it's completely. So fascinating to see those things work together mostly. But it's it's just really, really good.
Alyssa Wilkinson:It is. And, you know, and you take that one and you contrast it with a movie that is also on the list like Train Dreams, which is like a very small meditative movie about a guy living his life, you know, in the Northwest. And I just eat that's such a wide range of movies to all land on the same list. And that one is equally amazing. So I just think they did a pretty good job picking them this year.
Marcus Goodyear:Right. Go Hollywood. We can do this.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yes. Alyssa, we have talked a lot about your book, We Tell Ourselves Stories. And it is out now, correct, and coming out on paperback soon. Is that right?
Alyssa Wilkinson:It'll be out in paperback in June, but it's out in hardcover wherever you get your books.
Marcus Goodyear:It's also on Audible. If you like,
Alyssa Wilkinson:yes, and I read it.
Marcus Goodyear:We have Alyssa herself reading it. It's quite good.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yes. Yeah, it was really good. Awesome. Well, we hope everyone will pick up the book. You also have other books.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Was reading about I haven't gone to read Salty. Is that right?
Alyssa Wilkinson:That's
Camille Hall-Ortega:right. Just tell us a little bit about that one too, as we wrap up.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Yeah, Salty is a collection of short essays, I guess, about women from history who I admire artists, activists, writers, but all through the lens of food. There are recipes and illustrations. Is a very good gift book, but I think is also a real fun read.
Marcus Goodyear:And I think there's one about zombies too, right?
Alyssa Wilkinson:There is. There is. There is. I co wrote a book called How to Survive the Apocalypse, in which we write about, well, about the philosopher Charles Taylor, but that's the quiet part. We write about the apocalypse in pop culture.
Alyssa Wilkinson:And yeah, how to survive the apocalypse, which we're attempting to do.
Camille Hall-Ortega:So good. Fantastic. I'm just grateful for our conversation today because it really brought so many things top of mind that are timely. These ideas of the stories that we tell ourselves and how we're framing things, spinning things, how they affect us. That's important.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Really important. Just thank you for your work and thank you for being with us. We appreciate it.
Alyssa Wilkinson:Thank you. This has been really great.
Marcus Goodyear:The Echoes Podcast is written and produced by Camille HallOrtega, Rob Stinnett, and me, Marcus Goodyear. It's edited by Rob Stinnett and Kim Stone. Our executive producers are Patton Dodd and David Rogers. Our original music is by Johnny Rogers. Special thanks to our guest today, New York Times film critic, Alyssa Wilkinson.
Marcus Goodyear:Alyssa, do you subscribe to Echoes Magazine?
Alyssa Wilkinson:Oh, of course.
Marcus Goodyear:And you too can subscribe to echoesmagazine.org. You'll receive a beautiful print magazine each quarter. It's free. You can find a link in our show notes. The Echoes Podcast and Echoes Magazine are both productions brought to you by the HEBUT Foundation.
Marcus Goodyear:You can learn more about our vision and mission at hebfdn.org. If you've enjoyed this episode, follow us wherever you listen to podcasts and be sure to leave a review because it matters.