The Iron Giant

0:00:03.4 Landry Ayres: Welcome to Pop & Locke. I’m Landry Ayres.

0:00:05.5 Landry Ayres: What if an alien robot crash-​landed in the middle of rural Maine? What if it was equipped with high-​powered lasers and rocket launchers, and what if that glorified walking gun didn’t want to be a gun? We’ll discuss all that and more today, because we watched the animated cult classic, the Iron Giant.

0:00:32.1 Landry Ayres: Joining me today are executive producer at Return on Ideas, and returning guest, Sean Malone.

0:00:39.1 Sean Malone: Hey, Landry, how you doing?

0:00:40.5 Landry Ayres: And interim director at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org, our good friend, Paul Meany.

0:00:48.1 Paul Meany: Hiya.

0:00:49.1 Landry Ayres: Paul specifically has been talking with me about this movie for a good amount of time, we’ve had it kind of on the back burner for a while, wanted to do an episode about it, because it just has a lot of really strong themes that I think our audience would be curious about. But even beyond that, I mean, we can feel free to get into that as well, but beyond that, what makes the Iron Giant to the two of you stand out as a film, as an animated film, as any type of story? I mean, compared to the Disney and Pixar and DreamWorks animated films that it’s sort of in the same vein as, it does stand out and has its own distinct style. So what about it makes it special to the two of you?

0:01:35.5 Paul Meany: So I actually, I didn’t watch Iron Giant as a kid. I didn’t watch very animated films as a child, so I actually watched Iron Giant as an adult, and it still broke me down to tears, like the little baby I am. But what really shocked me about it is that it’s… Most animated films take place in a fantastical world, not in 1957 Maine, and I think that’s really, really interesting, that it’s… The only fantastical element is the Iron Giant, but the rest of it’s played pretty super straight for the most part.

0:02:05.7 Sean Malone: I don’t remember how old I was when I first saw this movie, I was probably… Well, I was certainly not a little kid, it would have been 17, 18, maybe somewhere in there. And you said it broke you down to tears, Paul, but it does that to me every time I watch it. It still does, every time I watch it. It hasn’t changed. I think, to answer your question, Landry, the direction, and the writing in particular, from Tim McCanlies, who also wrote Secondhand Lions, which is another one of my favorite movies, Tim McCanlies directed that movie as well, and then of course, Brad Bird, who… This was Brad Bird’s first feature animated film, and then of course, he went on to do The Incredibles and Ratatouille and Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol, of all things.

0:02:58.9 Sean Malone: But those… It’s a beautifully crafted film, it’s a beautifully executed film, but also it’s just got such powerful characters and such a powerful theme overall about self, self-​ownership and choosing who you are as a person, free will, those kinds of things. It’s such an amazing film when, especially in context of so many of the messages that you see in children’s animated movies, even in that era, a lot of times not that great or really not even that clear, but the Iron Giant remains one of the best examples of theme in storytelling of any adult or children or whatever, and it’s just got such a great heart to it that I often describe it as my favorite film, if people ask me that question.

0:04:05.3 Paul Meany: I’d definitely throw it up very, very high on the list, and I completely agree that even though it’s a children’s film, I actually hate saying “even though it’s a children’s film,” because a lot of kids’ films have really important and interesting messages, but I agree that a lot of them… A lot of them boil down to very, very simplistic ideas, and this movie could have existed with just Hogarth and the message could have been be yourself, but it doesn’t. It has the Iron Giant as a kind of a way to talk about the message in not a super cheesy way because he’s something alien and indifferent, but that makes it more universal, almost.

0:04:36.5 Sean Malone: Every character, I think in this film, every significant character has opportunities to demonstrate their own choices as individuals, and it doesn’t treat… One of the things I was trying to put my finger on the other day, but it could rely on stereotypes far more than it actually does. There are comical stereotypes of, you know, Dean’s sort of beatnik, and there’s these kind of like redneck Mainers and like sailors and stuff like that, but you’d also think that a movie like this would just make the Army in general into the big villain, and it’s actually not. There are aspects of all of those things where every character has a chance to be human and make a choice, and I think that that’s something that adds a lot of depth to it. I agree with you, like saying it’s for a children’s film or whatever, there are tons of films made for adults that do not have this level of depth either.

0:05:38.3 Paul Meany: And just with what you’re saying about Dean and individualism and making choices, and at the very beginning of the film, Hogarth kind of meets Dean and Dean goes along with him in hiding the score from his mother, but eventually they become closer, and they start talking one night and they’re drinking coffee, and he’s… Hogarth’s hyperactive on espresso and he’s talking about whole life, and he’s saying he’s bullied in school, everyone calls him a shrimp and everyone thinks that he thinks he’s better than everyone, ’cause he gets good grades, but if everyone tried as hard as he did, they could do, so on and so forth.

0:06:10.7 Paul Meany: But Dean just replies like, “Yeah, who cares what these groups think. They don’t decide who you are, you decide you choose to be.” I don’t know if it’s the first instance of that kind of message coming out of the film, but I think that a lot of the movie is about how appearances can be deceiving. Like you might judge someone like Dean, he’s a beatnik, you don’t know what he could be like, he’s just a drifter, a loser or whatever. Hogarth’s just a shrimpy kid. The Iron Giant could be an evil alien, but all of that isn’t true at all.

0:06:40.5 Landry Ayres: The notion of theme, I think, is very, very important, because Brad Bird gets a lot of… I mean, flak is a good way of putting it, but also gets kind of recognized or tagged as oddly a very objectivist filmmaker because of some of the themes that are present in his movies. Specifically, I’ve seen a lot of it in The Incredibles, specifically The Incredibles 2, as well as Tomorrowland, which has a very parallel or similar community to Galt’s Gulch from some of Ayn Rand’s writing, but there’s also a lot of coverage that very much rebukes that, along with Bird’s own claims that he thinks that that lens of looking at his work is lazy and not accurate. While some of those ideas might fit and map well onto some of his works, he’s much less about these types of choices or specialized, special people in a political sense, and much more in a sort of artistic sense.

0:07:48.3 Landry Ayres: But there is some objectivist tones to this, the exceptional quality of certain characters and forging your own path, that individualism that Meany had talked about, as well as the villain being a corrupt, power-​hungry government employee, but I do think that that narrative choice to make that a plot device doesn’t really reinforce that notion as a theme in the work. The movie is not about that type of government corruption, it is simply using that archetype as something to drive the plot forward, whereas the theme that Brad Bird actually pitched this movie with, I believe he said… He pitched this movie to Warner Brothers after he had read a treatment of it, and they, I believe already owned the rights based on a stage musical that had been written by Pete Townshend of The Who, one of his many sort of odd musical projects for the stage, that was just like how Tommy had all these different variations and such, there was a stage play and there was a treatment that was written up by someone and then Brad Bird got ahold of it.

0:09:10.6 Landry Ayres: And he basically wrote this version of the script that was based around the idea, What if a gun had a soul and didn’t want to be a gun, which I think is really emblematic of what both the two of you have said about wanting to choose who you are and not being limited or pigeon-​holed into any one thing by other people, but choosing what you can do with your time and what your purpose is, and also is interesting from a sort of libertarian standpoint to talk about the nature of and purpose of what a gun can do, which is interesting, but for a lot of other reasons.

0:09:54.1 Paul Meany: So at the time of working on the movie, something very tragic happened in Brad Bird’s own life, his sister was shot by her husband, I think it was, but don’t quote me on that. So he was going through a very tough time himself, and while he was grieving, he read about Sylvia Plath’s husband who wrote a short story, I think it’s called the Iron Giant, could be called the Iron Man, but about a giant metal man who could fix himself, and it’s kind of like a fairytale to help his children get over their mother’s death. But when I was watching the film with my poor, poor mother, who I feel so bad for her watching movies with me, because I just… I kept turning to her and being, “it’s so Aristotelian,” and I kept saying all these things.

0:10:30.0 Paul Meany: But I think it’s kind of true in lots of ways, and not because Brad Bird was reading Aristotle every day of the week and trying to superimpose it, but because the general principles kind of hold true in a lot of ways, that we are what we do, not just what we think, and that we have a choice on a lot of matters, and virtue is a habit that we work every single day, and also other smaller themes, like Plato and Aristotle, two great ancient philosophers, have big disagreements over what the role of media should be for educating people, like should people be allowed to read poetry or all sorts of plays that are critical of the state, that was very common in Athens. And Plato comes down saying that his ideal republic, the guardians who will over-​watch the whole estate, they would decide what comes in and what people would see and read and make sure that it’s of a certain quality.

0:11:18.8 Paul Meany: But Aristotle, who tutored Alexander the Great, he always was relying upon models, and he wrote whole book about the nature of theater and plays and poetry, called Poetics, pretty simply, but he showed the importance of imitation, that people learn by imitating their betters and they need some sort of… They need a guide to go off of, so he gave Alexander the Great the guide of Achilles. That didn’t exactly work out great for Alexander the Great, but you can see the idea of how having standards to imitate and things to look up to and virtue as a practical means of choosing things, it’s not just something you’re born with, it’s something you have to earn, practice.

0:11:58.3 Sean Malone: Yeah, I think you see that theme in a lot of… I mean, just going back to one of the things you said earlier, Landry, but I feel like this theme comes up again and again in Brad Bird’s work in particular, but it also comes up again and again… Well, again, and again maybe is strong because Tim McCanlies hasn’t done that much stuff in general, but this theme carries over so, so strongly in Secondhand Lions, that like the pairing of Brad Bird and Tim McCanlies as writer and director, in the case of The Iron Giant, it’s just… It’s kind of lightning in a bottle to some extent, because especially if you care about these kinds of ideas, just ’cause I think you had two people who were really, really in sync about that core philosophical idea.

0:12:44.3 Sean Malone: It is interesting to me that… And you can see this all the time, but it’s really fascinating to me where people can create something just by focusing on a theme that has a really philosophically profound quality to it without actually being necessarily students of philosophy or people who are really setting out to be philosophers or whatever. And I think that there’s kind of a lesson there for a lot of… You know, we’re doing this for lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. There’s a lesson there for a lot of libertarian communicators out there, because you don’t have to slam people over the head with the message that you are trying to push; rather what you need to do is build characters and have their characters be tied in deeply to a particular theme. And I think that’s kind of the beauty of this in a very Aristotelian sort of way, it is actually using the characters to model and the characters in the plot to model a particular type of philosophy and the way that you should live.

0:14:03.1 Sean Malone: And it’s also, as an added bonus, it’s not only really well done, it’s also a really good message about that exact kind of thing that Paul was talking about, the work that you have to do every day to be the person that you actually want to be, it does not come out of the box. And in some cases, Iron Giant being a very good example of this, what you are born with may actually conflict directly with the person that you want to be, and it’s even harder work than other people are going to have to do. And I think that the fact that the Iron Giant makes that choice and then reaffirms that choice repeatedly, and maybe this is the part where we should talk about the added scenes in the 25th anniversary edition…

0:14:51.9 Landry Ayres: Please, please go ahead.

0:14:55.4 Sean Malone: So the theatrical release cuts out what is essentially a flashback to the Iron Giant as definitively a robot that was created by an alien race to commit genocide, essentially. And you actually get some scenes which I personally, I really wish weren’t cut in the original release, because they’re really… I think they add a lot of value in set up for how powerful the Iron Giant is as a weapon, he is an absolutely devastating weapon, and you get a little taste of that at the end of the movie when it’s sort of revealed that… And I suppose anybody watching this is going to have to deal with spoilers here, but they’re listening to this, but at the end of the movie, the Iron Giant ends up having to protect Hogarth, and it is in those moments that he chooses to sort of turn… Well, in some cases, he’s just attacked and defends himself, kind of unthinkingly, but he also has to defend Hogarth, and when he’s doing that, you get a little glimpse of how dangerous he actually is.

0:16:13.3 Sean Malone: His weapon systems activate and all this kind of stuff. But in the 25th anniversary, you get a lot more of that and it’s better set up, it’s just from a narrative, just from a writing standpoint, I think it’s a better… I think it’s a better storytelling element there.

0:16:32.5 Paul Meany: My idea of the film, I’m watching, I watch the regular version. My idea was always that he crash-​landed on Earth, and that kind of like reprogrammed him or wiped his memory or something, and he’s basically like a new person. I kind of… This is really weird, but I kind of see a similarity between The Iron Giant and Futurama, because in Futurama, Bender gets shocked and that changes his whole programming, and it’s kind of like this message that you’re not born to do one thing and we can always change our perspective on the world. Now, that could be ’cause you get your antenna stuck in a light bulb or fall from space, but whatever it is, we’re not stuck in one path in life.

0:17:10.7 Sean Malone: Yeah, I think that that’s absolutely the catalyst for it, but I think what that really does, because the Iron Giant basically spends most of that movie repairing himself, and you’ll notice that that’s really… That’s actually really strongly… I don’t even know if I would say it’s implied, it’s pretty much directly stated, because the moment that the Iron Giant loses his, sort of loses control, basically, and stops trying to not be a gun, the final injury that he has, which is a little dent on his head, pops out and he is fully healed at that point, which really suggests that the fully healed version of the Giant, like physically healed version of the Giant, the version that is as the manufacturer intended, is this horrifying killing machine.

0:18:05.6 Sean Malone: But I love that, actually, because it really reinforces the idea that you have to make a choice, you have to consciously choose, it’s not necessarily the default state, so yeah, the catalyst for him hanging out with Hogarth is that he’s injured and he’s kind of returned to infancy to some degree, he’s kind of a toddler the entire time, but once he regains his entire faculty is then he has full agency, and now he has the opportunity to say, Okay, am I going to be a gun or am I going to be, in his case, Superman? Which is, that just kills me every time, it’s just such a [0:18:46.9] ____.

0:18:47.8 Paul Meany: Do not get me started on him flying up and closing his eyes, saying, “Superman.” When I first watched this movie, I was like 21 or something…

0:18:54.8 Sean Malone: Just bawling my eyes out, every time.

0:18:56.7 Paul Meany: I know, I know.

0:18:58.5 Landry Ayres: Who would have ever thought that Dominic Toretto, Xander Cage, Groot himself, Vin Diesel would be having us all weeping like that with this role. I tell you, I can’t believe it sometimes.

0:19:15.2 Sean Malone: It’s true, honestly, it’s astounding because he barely says anything.

0:19:20.3 Landry Ayres: He barely says anything, and it’s a testament to the really amazing innovative animation work and writing, but… General, just the team work in the production behind this movie is truly incredible, everyone came and complemented one another in really, really amazing ways, and I think that, the process that went into making this movie is just as emblematic of some of these themes that we’ve talked about as the narrative that the film tells in and of itself.

0:19:54.9 Landry Ayres: So when Brad Bird was sort of attached to this project, it was sort of in the midst of this big transition and a lot of acquisitions between Warner Brothers and Time Warner and things that were going on, so studios were changing, and Brad Bird had been working… He’d been a consultant on The Simpsons for many times, and he’d worked with… He did things here and there, but never had a lot of sole creative control, and these animation studios tend to, because they’re very big, and marketing is a big part of them, they tend to get a lot of attention and it’s very rigid and structured, and they have to have so many boxes checked, even more than a lot of dramatic sort of…

0:20:40.5 Paul Meany: That’s what amazes me most is this movie was ever made the way it is, because it is so critical of America at the time. It’s like normally animated kids’ films kind of try to stay away from that, but it makes America look quite bad. And it’s also the idyllic setting of Maine, it’s kind of like this underlying fear that it’s a gorgeous little place and you love seeing Hogarth’s life, but at the same time, every newspaper in the movie has these terrible apocalyptic headlines that you can’t help but think, like again, nuclear armageddon’s just on its way, duck and cover, kids.

0:21:15.0 Landry Ayres: Well, he even, Brad Bird even said, the idyllic setting of Maine and that time, the very… All of the art is inspired by Norman Rockwell and that type of artistic expression, but the simmering tension of Cold War fears is just bubbling underneath the surface everywhere you go, and there’s all this anxiety about weapons and Sputnik, and there’s the comics and movies that are going on and fear of the Russians and stuff like that…

0:21:40.6 Paul Meany: But that plays into the script, because at a certain point when Hogarth first meets the Iron Giant, he gets super excited. I tried to write it down, the exact quote, but I couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying, but he was saying. “People always wig out and start shooting where they see something new like you.” And that’s kind of exactly what happens, but a lot of the movies about how the mainstream culture or the mainstream way of viewing things isn’t always correct, and sometimes you’ve got to rely on shrimpy, nerdy kids, beatniks and all sorts.

0:22:10.9 Landry Ayres: Right, which is what Brad Bird was trying to do with the production. Because they came to him and Time Warner had failed with this Quest for Camelot animated feature where they were kind of trying to emulate a lot of other studios at the time, and it was a tremendous flop, it did very, very poorly. So they were very, very hesitant with the Iron Giant. But in doing so, they also gave Brad Bird and his studio a lot of leeway and more autonomy than they were used to working on an animated picture, and that type of… So it was more autonomy, but they also had less time and money to make this movie, something like half the budget that they would normally be expected for this, and half the time.

0:22:56.1 Landry Ayres: So they’re having to both cut corners and innovate using new technology, like literal animation software that is being developed and is new at the time, but also having to do so for… You know, sort of necessity is the mother of invention in that sense. But in doing so, Brad Bird created a very kind of Skunk Works-​esque way of working that sort of by taking these big risks ended up paying off.

0:23:30.6 Paul Meany: But, see, it didn’t pay off, though, at the box office, it paid off in time.

0:23:34.5 Landry Ayres: Right, but a lot… What we have realized looking back is that a lot of the reception to the movie was actually very, very… It was very good, it just didn’t get seen by a lot of people because it was a marketing failure. The Iron Giant did not have the… They had like one poster that was produced, it didn’t get a lot of… They didn’t want it to be Quest for Camelot, so they weren’t promoting it a whole lot, it did not get the press that people were expecting, but when people saw it, they really, really enjoyed it, it just didn’t get in front of enough eyes. And so The Iron Giant came to be seen as this sort of interesting built-​up character that could be used for all of these amazing things, but was then lost, which I think is really interesting and ironic, because just within the past couple of years, he has been put into both Space Jam 2 and the Warner Brothers’ MultiVersus, like Battle Royale game, which are just two tremendous cash-​grabs.

0:24:38.3 Sean Malone: He was in Player One as well.

0:24:40.6 Landry Ayres: Yeah, he was in Ready Player One also.

0:24:43.1 Sean Malone: Right, right, right, right. Yeah, I mean, look, all that stuff. So there’s all kinds of this behind the scenes aspects of a lot of these things that are really fascinating. I do think that there’s some saving grace to this a little bit, ’cause although the Iron Giant character has been in a couple of these other things, I have yet, and maybe I’m about to jinx this to some degree, but I’ve yet to hear a lot of people recommend like remaking the film, which I desperately hope does not happen in this case.

0:25:12.5 Landry Ayres: Right, nor a sequel.

0:25:13.2 Paul Meany: But I will say, I will say, if they remade the film, it’s the perfect time, because tensions, America’s kind of going back to the same place it was before with international tensions and fear of the other, so I think maybe it wouldn’t be good, but it’d be at the right time.

0:25:29.3 Sean Malone: Yeah, of course, it wouldn’t be the… Yeah, I don’t think the same lessons would come out of it, though, so that’s kind of the problem with… I think, honestly, a lot of it is just this incredible focus on craft that Brad Bird had, and also, by the way, let’s just pause for a second and note that Brad Bird was one of the first people to be brought on board by John Lasseter coming into Pixar and really built what the Pixar describes as their brain trust and that kind of thing. And I don’t think that… I mean, one, obviously, he was already kind of becoming well-​known in animator circles, but I think the The Iron Giant really solidified that recognition of Brad Bird as this really phenomenal…

0:26:20.6 Paul Meany: I’ve heard people say The Iron Giant is a movie for animation students. A lot of people look up to it as quite genius and artistically… I wouldn’t know anything, but…

0:26:32.2 Landry Ayres: I believe it. It’s interesting, ’cause CalArts students were brought on to help in the crunch time of producing it at one point, interestingly enough. So it wasn’t just that they look up to it, but that it was sort of a proof that they can be as just as involved as the people who are professionals.

0:26:49.4 Sean Malone: Yeah, and for those who don’t know that, John Lasseter was at CalArts before being tapped by Steve Jobs, actually, to head up Pixar.

[music]

0:27:03.1 Sean Malone: I also want to say something else about this that I just always really loved, which is… You’re right, Paul. A lot of this movie is about finding or breaking through stereotypes and finding the value that people contribute, even though the little shrimpy kid or the beatnik or whatever, but I also want to say that almost, very few of the characters are actually stereotypes, even the villains. So okay, yes, well, I don’t know, I guess for the time, Christopher McDonald… Kent Mansley, by the way, Kent Mansley is just my favorite name for a government agent, it’s just so perfect. But Kent Mansley is, first of all, breaking the stereotype of the hyper-​competent government agent that you would have in seen in the ’80s and ’90s and whatever.

0:27:56.1 Sean Malone: But on the other hand, I always appreciated the fact that John Mahoney’s General Rogard was not an insane… Like the idea of, especially kind of in the early 2000s, you started to get this idea of the warmonger, like violent lunatic general. Think about the general in Avatar, James Cameron’s Avatar, just this kind of lunatic.

0:28:25.8 Paul Meany: But often, today in movies, a lot of the times, the military is right next to the shady secret agents in Washington and all sorts, and they’re kind of just treated as almost like lackeys who go along with it. But in this movie, the military are like, “No, this is suicide. This is a terrible idea.”

0:28:41.2 Sean Malone: Yeah, and I love that about that movie, because it doesn’t… It shows that Mansley is not… The point is not necessarily in this case that every member of the government or every government agent is some kind of lunatic like Mansley, it’s that Mansley as an individual has gone down this path, and other individuals who are in similar positions and power to Mansley don’t agree with him. And so we can actually have that conversation too, it’s not so black and white that it’s like, “Here are all the bad guys on this side and here are all the good guys,” it’s like, “Well, we’ve got one lunatic here,” who then, the end where Mansley’s like “Launch the missile,” and he’s like, “Are you kidding?” And then of course, General Rogard actually like forces Mansley to stay there, which is like, okay.

0:29:34.6 Paul Meany: Oh, yeah, I remember that too. So if you’ll permit me to start doing some libertarian reaching, possibly too far-​reaching, but I think a lot of the movie, Mansley isn’t like an evil guy, and I think it’s the movie kind of does a little bit of this, but I don’t think Mansley’s like evil, I think he’s just been influenced by the world he lives in, ’cause there’s a certain part where he’s talking to Hogarth and he’s trying to convince them, he’s like, “Hogarth, just tell me where this thing is,” and he’s talking… And he’s saying, “Everyone wants what we have and we have to destroy them before they destroy us.” And it kind of just goes in exactly what Hogarth said earlier, that people will wig out, they’ll go crazy and they’ll start shooting us if they see something new, they’re not ready to see the Iron Giant.

0:30:14.7 Paul Meany: But Mansley isn’t an evil fellow. In a lot of ways, he’s just trying to look out… It could be anything. It could be absolutely anything that the Iron Giant is, and he doesn’t know, he’s absolutely terrified, and so he doesn’t do anything he does out of a sense of evil, it’s most of time out of kind of a sense of duty and paranoia, but also caring. But it shows how your perception of people can just be influenced by your fear of them, that most people… So when Hogarth first encounters the Iron Giant, he’s a child, so he just thinks it’s great. It’s the best thing ever.

0:30:43.9 Sean Malone: Well, and it’s a child who also loves monsters, ’50s sci-​fi, and the 50-​foot robot, it’s just like the greatest… It’s the greatest thing a kid could have.

0:30:55.1 Paul Meany: When Dean first meets the robot, he runs away, of course. And then eventually he comes to a kind of detente, and he’s, “Okay, the giant can stay in my house for a night or so.” And eventually he’s calling up Hogarth, saying, “You’ve got to get this guy out of here.” But then they start to work together, making art, and you can only see that… Yeah, of course, if you only view other people as a danger and you can’t get anything from them, you’re never going to want anyone new or anything different, and you’re always going to view outsiders as only a bad thing.

0:31:23.2 Sean Malone: Yeah, so Dean has always been probably my favorite character in the film, maybe apart from the Iron Giant himself, in part because going back to kinda what I’m saying, like Dean… Dean is a beatnik, but Dean also… He’s not high all the time. He’s not an… Dean doesn’t even quite fit the stereotype of beatnik, he’s actually a pretty practical guy in a lot of ways, he is not living off of welfare or charity or anything like that, he’s making a living. He is actually a really interesting character, because he does… He has a business that he runs, that he seems to take seriously, but also that business fuels his passion, his art, and those kinds of things.

0:32:16.0 Sean Malone: But also as a character, I think Dean represents reason and openness, which you don’t really get as clearly with any of the other characters, like Hogarth just represents kind of wonder and excitement for this new thing, but Dean actually pauses and says, “Okay, this giant can be dangerous,” he’s not oblivious to the fact that he’s with a child who potentially needs to be protected from this thing, but he is also curious enough and intelligent enough and reasonable enough to say, “Okay, but I don’t need to assume that. I don’t need to assume that the Giant is this monster. So let’s see what happens.”

0:32:54.9 Paul Meany: I also love that Dean says, “It’s not my style to report someone to the authorities,” at some point. But I think as well, he’s a reasonable person, but he doesn’t need every answer out there in front of him. It’s kind of funny that when he talks about his junk yard, he’s like, “Am I a junk man, or am I an artist,” and it doesn’t really seem to bother him, whatever is, ’cause he’s happy. It doesn’t really bother him, the perception of others, and it’s kind of just a throwaway line that goes over you, but if you look into a little bit like them, [0:33:23.4] ____ this script is just covered in ideas.

0:33:27.5 Sean Malone: Well, I love that because, honestly, a lot of times you see kind of beatniks or… And maybe this is my kind of atheism and whatever, kind of playing into this a little bit, but you see a lot of these kinds of characters that end up being beatniks or hippies or whatever, and yeah, they end up being the cool character in the film, or they end up being the one that has the little piece of magically sage advice or whatever in this moment. But they’re also like nuts, most of the time, they’re people who…

0:34:02.6 Landry Ayres: Yeah, kind of dumb, sometimes, absent-​minded, right?

0:34:07.4 Sean Malone: Yeah, and also they just believe everything like, “Oh, your chakras.” And it’s just like, Okay, like I don’t want that character. I want the character like Dean, who is actually just a pretty normal dude, but does his own thing, He’s in rural Maine yet he likes jazz, he likes espresso, he’s sort of… You get the sense that maybe he’s traveled a little bit or at least he’s read about other parts of the world, and he’s not afraid of the other so much. And that’s such a great thing.

0:34:39.3 Paul Meany: I was reading a statistic the other day, and it said that most people who ever lived before the 20th century, like 95% of people only traveled 30 kilometers away from their home. I’m not sure of the exact validity of that quote, but the general idea is there that most people in our history are not used to seeing something wildly different, even wildly different people, let alone giant robots.

0:35:03.2 Sean Malone: Well, just look at how the movie or all the other townsfolk treat the sailor at the beginning, who sees the Iron Giant emerge…

0:35:14.3 Landry Ayres: First thing I was thinking of.

0:35:17.0 Sean Malone: They all just… He is a complete nut case, right.

0:35:20.5 Paul Meany: And Dean, being the perfect man, as always, says… He says like, “Someone has to defend the cooks, if no one does, who will?”

0:35:27.5 Sean Malone: Yeah. Well, it’s great, that’s a great moment too, because Dean doesn’t believe him, like Dean doesn’t believe that guy either, but he’s just… He’s like, “Look, man, you don’t need to beat him up over this, like he saw something, who knows what it was,” but Dean doesn’t go for the irrational position there either. He’s not like, “Well, that guy just had some wild claim, and I’m definitely going to fall right into it.” He’s waiting for evidence and it’s just… I don’t know. Anyway, but in any case, Dean ends up being Hogarth’s role model, which is… And father figure, and then by the end of the movie, presumably sort of his stepfather, actually, and that’s… Again, I feel like so many kids’ movies have such terrible lessons, so much of the time, and they offer role models that are actually really bad.

0:36:20.6 Paul Meany: Name and shame.

0:36:23.3 Sean Malone: Well, okay, like the Lorax, for example, just off the top of my head, it’s vehemently anti-​capitalist, it basically tries to scold people into treating the environment better, but it also has wildly inconsistent views of what it means to treat the environment well. It’s based on completely irrational premises in so many ways. You could go down the list of kids movies and you’ll find tons and tons of just bad…

0:36:58.3 Paul Meany: My least favorite is The Lion King. Lion King… Not movie-​wise, obviously it’s a great movie. But message-​wise, Lion King is just like, isn’t divine monarchy fabulous.

0:37:08.9 Sean Malone: Yeah. There’s another great example. Well, yeah, okay, so we can go down the list of Disney movies that give people irrational expectations about relationships, that give people bizarre understandings of government, where I think Disney has probably done more than almost anything else to institute this idea of the right person in charge will fix all of our problems. We just get rid of the evil stepmother and return the good king to power or the good queen or whatever, everything will be okay.

0:37:41.5 Sean Malone: Like those are horrible, horrible messages for kids, and they are horrible ways to teach people about the state, for example, but they’re everywhere, and The Iron Giant offers skepticism of the state without vilifying, sort of blanket vilifying all government agents. It glorifies reason, it glorifies free will and choice, it glorifies moral agency, and its hero is ultra-​powerful and exceptionally dangerous and chooses to use that power for good and for defense. Amazing, absolutely amazing. And it’ll make you cry.

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0:38:33.3 Landry Ayres: And you know what, here, Paul, your moment has arrived. Here’s what we’ll do.

0:38:37.2 Paul Meany: My time to shine.

0:38:39.0 Landry Ayres: Paul, because you specifically requested it, we are going to do our favorite old segment, Locked In. What else have you been enjoying in your free time other than reliving the joyous time of watching the Iron Giant, Paul?

0:38:54.4 Paul Meany: I’m glad you asked, Landry, ’cause every Pop & Locke I’ve been on, I never give a proper answer because I don’t watch much TV. But I have watched a TV show, so, ha ha ha, I’ve finally done it. So my TV show is What We Do In The Shadows, and I’ve watched all four seasons now, and I love it.

0:39:13.8 Landry Ayres: Great choice. I have watched everything but the very last episode of the last season. I’ve been avoiding it. I need to buckle down and watch it, ’cause I do love it.

0:39:23.9 Paul Meany: I spent my whole time just thinking about the practicalities of vampires, and I got so into it that I ended up reading a few papers about the mathematics behind it. Depending on… One paper had three different models it used, and I was saying, like the classic Dracula vampires, the whole world of being vampires is less than half the year, but the only co-​existing, the vampires we can have, is the Twilight scenario, so just putting it out there.

0:39:45.9 Landry Ayres: It’s great… I mean, don’t get… I’m not mad about it. I love the Twilight films, one of my favorite, favorite film series.

0:39:55.3 Sean Malone: I have not… I stopped watching… I watched out of… Legitimately, I watched the first two Twilight movies, or first one-​and-​a-​half Twilight movies out of professional curiosity, literally. They were doing really, really well in theaters at the time, like… Well, no, I watched them way later on, streaming or whatever, but I was like… I was living with filmmakers, as I have most of my life until I got married, and we were like, “God, people love these things. We don’t know why. So let’s see.”

0:40:34.3 Paul Meany: In What We Do In The Shadows, they recreate the baseball scene, but with football.

0:40:38.5 Landry Ayres: They do, I love it.

0:40:39.4 Sean Malone: Oh, my gosh. But the baseball scene…

0:40:44.3 Landry Ayres: One of the best scenes in modern cinema, I must say, the first movie in the Twilight, we’ve had a Twilight episode of this show, what am I doing? I’ve done this before. Twilight 1, bad, but fun to watch. Two, New Moon, not great. It’s just not good.

0:41:00.7 Sean Malone: This is why I stopped, I watched one-​and-​a-​half and I was like, “This is terrible,” and I gave up.

0:41:06.6 Landry Ayres: Three, they introduced some crazy stuff and it’s not good, but you start to get into it and it’s weird. Four is just bonkers, and I enjoy it because it’s so off the wall.

0:41:19.8 Sean Malone: That’s a commitment there.

0:41:22.9 Landry Ayres: Breaking Dawn part 2, it got me at the end. It got me at the end. I was… There was a moment where I was like, “Oh!” And I gasped.

0:41:28.5 Paul Meany: You just went the full character arc.

0:41:30.6 Sean Malone: You did. What We Do In The Shadows… I’m going to bring this back to this for a second, is I am so impressed with the TV series, because the movie is phenomenal, if you haven’t seen… If anybody hasn’t seen Taika Waititi’s mockumentary version of… And Jemaine Clement’s, mockumentary version of What We Do In The Shadows, like the film, the feature film, it is so phenomenal. And when they announced the TV series, first of all, my gut reaction was negative, because I was like, You cannot translate that.

0:42:02.8 Sean Malone: And then two, I didn’t want to see those characters from the film recast as weaker, less funny versions for the teachers, and they avoided it entirely by making the show about the broader world of the vampires and adding different characters outright. And then as an added bonus, we’ve gotten cameos of Jemaine Clement and Taika in the series. So it actually ended up being perfect, and it’s just… That’s a phenomenal, phenomenal, Paul. I’m glad you’re checking that out, Paul, that’s great.

0:42:41.7 Sean Malone: I watched Dahmer, which is as anti-​Iron Giant as you can get, I feel like. It is very, very well made, utterly horrifying, and I do not necessarily recommend wallowing in that level of just human evil.

0:43:03.4 Paul Meany: Is it a TV show or a movie?

0:43:05.3 Sean Malone: It’s a series, 10 episodes on Netflix. Evan Peters is phenomenal, Richard Jenkins is phenomenal. Molly Ringwald, oddly enough, shows up as Dahmer’s step-​mom. I haven’t seen Molly Ringwald in years. She does a great job. It is utterly horrifying, however, because you basically spend the first four or five episodes… Oh, I love how they did it though, which is that they really focus on his victims, so what you do is every episode for the first like five, you get to know one of the people that he killed in a pretty… More extensive way, but that only makes it worse, because then you know what’s going to happen, and then you see what happens, and they do not pull a lot of punches in terms of the gruesome aspects of thing. It’s just utterly… But it’s also, as a libertarian, if you want something that will make you reinforce your hatred of the cops… Oh, boy, Dahmer is way up there. The cops got the… Like Dahmer’s neighbor called the cops on him dozens of times, and actively told the cops that he was probably killing people or probably doing something horrible in that apartment. They did nothing for a year, like nothing.

0:44:28.6 Sean Malone: It’s insane. Anyway, that was gruesome. Then last night, I wanted to shift gears radically, and introduced a friend of mine to Edward Scissorhands for the first time, so.

0:44:42.1 Landry Ayres: I haven’t watched a lot of new stuff recently, but I did, however, just start reading a book called Gideon the Ninth, which I’m really, really enjoying. It is a sort of science fantasy novel set in this world where there’s all these houses of like necromancers that control various mystical powers of life and death, and some of them are summoned to this planet by the emperor, who’s this undying king, to get brought into this order and become priests of the world or whatever. But there’s sword fights and very witty banter and kind of modern language in it, which normally in a TV show, I find very annoying, unless it’s done very well, but in this context, I don’t mind it at all, and there’s enough mystery and vagueness and very well-​written descriptions outside of the dialogue that make up for it and make it really, really interesting.

0:45:54.7 Landry Ayres: And it’s part of the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir. And it’s just a really, really fun… I don’t know what’s going to happen, but there’s sword-​fighting and necromancers and tombs and space flights, it’s kind of like Doon meets Gormenghast meets This Is How You Lose the Time War, it’s really, really interesting and fun stuff, really easy to read, but… I don’t even know where it’s going to go. I’m only a third of the way through the first book. But I already highly recommend it, Gideon the Ninth.

0:46:38.5 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to keep in touch with us and get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @popnlockepod, that’s pop, the letter N, locke with an E, like the philosopher, pod.

0:46:55.5 Landry Ayres: Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. We look forward to unraveling your favorite show or movie next time.

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