Episode 155: Dispatches From the Inside: On Planet Weird's 'The Unbinding'

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2023

⏱️ 90 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One of the most surprising aspects of paranormal experience is how often it takes on a storylike form, unfolding exactly as you would expect it to in, say, a Hollywood horror film. Viewers of Karl Pfeiffer's film The Unbinding will get a sense of this in the early sequences of Greg and Dana Newkirk's latest occult adventure. The haunting comes on strong and takes rather familiar forms. But the almost too-good-to-be-true frights -- effective as they are in an almost fairy-tale way -- soon give way to a procedural that invites us to ponder the ethics and methodologies of paranormal investigation in the age of Global Weirding. What do we owe the Others we encounter? What do they owe us? In this episode, JF and Phil discuss some of the questions haunting this brilliant documentary from the creators of Hellier. Support us on Patreon. Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia. Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Find us on Discord Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! REFERENCES Planet Weird, The Unbinding Weird Studies, Episode 67 on “Hellier” Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, “Sovereignty and the UFO” Duncan Barford, “Magick Versus Content” Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:02.0	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:20.0	For more episodes, or to support the podcast,
0:23.3	go to weirdstudies.com. Hi, welcome to Weird Studies. This is Phil.
0:54.0	This week, J.F. and I are discussing the new Planet Weird documentary film, The Unbinding.
1:01.2	Planet Weird is Dana and Greg Newkirk, along with their various associates who help them conduct
1:06.9	and film the paranormal investigations that are their stock and trade.
1:12.3	In episode 67, J.F. and I discussed the Planet Weird docu-series Hellier, the third season of which
1:19.0	is rumored to be in the works. If and when it drops, we will doubtless check back in with
1:24.4	that ongoing and deeply bizarre story. By contrast with Hellier, though,
1:30.0	the unbinding is a one-off, a monster of the weak, standalone adventure that follows the
1:35.6	Newkirks and their associates as they investigate a small wooden statue that unleashes chaos and
1:42.0	terror on anyone who possesses it. We do a decent job of telling this
1:46.9	story in what follows, so I won't say much more about it here. But I do want to clear up something
1:52.2	to which I allude in passing, a distinction between the inside and the outside.
1:59.1	Imagine I am playing an especially absorbing game, say, The Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom,
2:05.6	which I have been chipping away at since the summer.
2:08.7	I fight monsters, search for treasure, help out various Hiraulian NPCs,
2:13.9	and explore the gigantic, multi-tiered world that Nintendo has created for players to inhabit.
2:19.8	Within that world, I have real emotional experiences, events I will remember.
2:25.5	The other day, I jumped on the back of a dragon and rode it out of hell,
2:29.9	an experience that felt exactly as awesome as it sounds.
	...

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