Season 1, Gen X — Episode 11 — The Great Beauty (2013) + Hand of God (2021) w/Josiah Gogarty
Death is a PhotographShow Notes
Today, and once again, the Europeans outnumber the Americans on this week's DPP.
Chase and Sam are joined by British GQ staff writer and friend of the pod, Josiah Gogarty, [https://x.com/josiahgogarty] to discuss Italian director Paolo Sorrentino's seminal feature film The Great Beauty (2013) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dyt430YkQn0] and slightly self-indulgent coming-of-age piece The Hand of God (2021). [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_1VW_0i6vo]
Sorrentino, alongside Luca Guadagnino, is probably Italy's best-known Gen X director.
Behind the elevated chorals, lush birdsong, Palladian architecture and eurotrash fashion — The Great Beauty is a savage takedown of Italy's boomer elite, under Silvio Berlusconi and Forza Italia, by a rising Gen X figure.
It's Rome, sometime in the late 2000s, and the city's elderly elite have traded in the Marxism and literary idealism of their youth for easy indulgence, cocaine, dinner parties, and idle chatter. But they can't escape the rising generation below them, who, far from being lapsed idealists, present a front of destructive and cynical nihilism.
As the post-political age [https://thepointmag.com/politics/everything-is-hyperpolitical/] of Berlusconi transitions into the anti-political epoch of the Lega Nord, Five Star Movement and, finally, Giorgia Meloni (Gen X'ers to the last) — what can be salvaged from the wreck? Art, friendship, faith, really nice suits?
Find out in today's episode.
Josiah can be found on Twitter, at GQ [https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/profile/josiah-gogarty], the New Statesman [https://www.newstatesman.com/author/josiahgogarty], Monocle [https://monocle.com/contributors/josiah-gogarty/] and many other outlets.
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After a year, your hosts are ready to wrap Gen X. Season One is at a close. What did we learn about the self-professedly forgotten generation? What has Banksy to do with the spirit of the age? And, most importantly we answer the question that started it all: how did the dirty girls end up in the K-Hive?
DPP is back, baby — and this time for an encore. Chase and Sam thought they'd round out the season — find a 'capstone', if you will — for the last year. That pediment takes the form of Chris Smith's fly-on-the-wall documentary American Movie (1999).
Fear the coming of the trilby. Yes, that's right — today, in the last episode of our first season, we're looking at Gen X accelerating towards middle age and a crash encounter with those coming up behind them: millennials.