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Director's Notes – 151 – The Waterfall
🕑 Added 2019-08-01 17:01:03 +0000 UTC(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)
Los Angeles, Springtime, 2004. I went on a first date to the Body Worlds exhibit. If you don’t know what Body Worlds is, it’s a traveling exposition of skinless dead bodies that have been preserved by plastination and dissected so that you can see every blood vessel, muscle, organ, and nerve in pristine condition. I don’t want to knock it as a first date location, but I just wasn’t adequately prepared. I knew we were going to some kind of museum exhibit that had to do with science and anatomy. It is actually a dizzying confrontation with identity and existence.
A survey on their website says that 79% of people who go to the exhibit experience a “deep reverence for the marvel of the human body.” I had the opposite reaction. I was like, that’s it?? Shit, how am I even alive?? Looking at those thready nerves, fuzzy blood vessels, slabs of brain-meat...Your mind sees a brain and recoils. Your mind is like, “Ha ha nah, that ain’t me. I’m more than that. Don’t look at that! I SAID STOP LOOKING AT THAT *weeps*”
What I’m trying to say is, bodies are weird. Our relationships with our bodies are fraught. Our bodies do things that we can’t control and we are always at their mercy and we know that no matter what, one day they will betray us. What I’m trying to say is, it’s something we all have to come to terms with one day, but a first date is not the best day to do it. It was very difficult to order bubble tea afterwards and walk around in the LA heat and pretend like nothing had happened. I never went out with that person again. We remained acquaintances. But sometimes when I look at them, all I can see is a grinning skull wearing glasses.
Josh Crayton is an interesting character to me because as a shapeshifter, he has more “power” over his body than most other people do. And so I was interested in what would happen if he lost that power. It turns out, he behaves the same as many of us – he hides, he curses, he feels helpless, he avoids others, he wonders what it all means, he makes rash decisions, and finally comes to some kind of grudging acceptance. Hey, we’re all shapeshifters. We just can’t always choose the shapes.
- Brie Williams
August 1, 2019
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Comments
Quirk
This episode moved me.
Dave J Bowman
Years ago my class went to the Bodies exhibit in atlanta, and at the end of the exhibit was a table filled with postcards and pictures you could take home for free with the most infamous of their displays. I grabbed about 20 of them, just to have something to hold onto while my stomach tried to exit my own body as we left back to the bus. I remember feeling so sick that I crushed almost half of them before we made it back home that night, and made our bus late bc I had to get something to calm my nausea before taking a 3 hr ride home. Bodies are weird and unsettling and beautiful and breakable, and everybody has one but not everybody wants what they have, myself included. This episode hit fucking hard, so congrats team. It's easily in my top 5 rn.
Alicia
This immediately made my list of my favorite 5 WTNV episodes ever. Just beautiful.
Madeleine
I went to that exhibit and I was surprised I found it so interesting as I am pretty squeamish but then I found out that the Body Worlds exhibit, though it claims that it does not use unwilling cadavers, it does not have clear paper trails proving this, and the doctor who created it did at one point have cadavers in his lab that turned out to be homeless people, prisoners and indigent hospital patients (he was not charged and said he did not know, the Russian medical examiner who sold them was convicted of illegally selling the bodies). And there's also the Bodies exhibit, which fully admits to using unwilling cadavers!
Arcturus
My best friend and I both listened to this one as soon as it went up and were deeply moved by it. Beautiful writing and, wow, extremely good music accompaniment. Disparition outdid themselves on this one.
