Upstream - S4E9.5: Silence

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

This is a preview of a bonus episode. Find the whole thing on our Patreon! --- This week on the Kill James Bond bonus feed, November has been allowed to pick a religious movie and, naturally, has chosen Martin Scorsese's 3-hour long motion picture adaptation of the popular 'trolley problem' thought experiment. Andrew Garfield stars as a Jesuit missionary sneaking into Japan during the repression of Christians to find his missing mentor Liam Neeson.  --- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. As you well know I've been working with a few gazan families to raise money for their daily living costs in the genocide. As Aid has been restricted for nearly two weeks now, prices of food are skyrocketing. So we ask for you to keep helping them out, just a little longer. https://www.gofundme.com/f/a8jzz-help-me-and-my-family-get-out-of-the-gaza-strip https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-me-and-my-family-to-find-a-safe-place https://www.gofundme.com/f/htdcj-evacuating-my-family-from-gaza https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donate ----- WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com

INTRO MUSIC Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Catechize James Bond. I'm November Kelly, joined as always by my friends Abigail, Thor, and Devon. Hello! Hello. And it's a bonus episode, and I thought, as we had that interesting discussion at the end of The Wicker Man, I would sort of ruthlessly exploit that opportunity to make my friends watch three hours of Martin Scorsese being extremely Catholic by picking

the movie. Which is why on this episode we're joined by a very special guest, God himself. And he's here tonight. Welcome to the podcast. Very good. Very, very good. That joke will make sense in about 90 minutes. Yeah, yeah. That's set make sense in about 90 minutes.

That's set up, and then let it go. I picked the movie Silence, right, which is a really really funny first Scorsese movie for us to do. A director who spent like most of his career working with like themes of violence and masculinity, and we pick one of the few movies of his where those are kind of on the back burner. Um, the- I hadn't heard of this!

Yeah! Just, and it came out in 2016 and has a stacked cast, and I had like, had not, this wasn't on my radar at all. It was a huge failure, commercially. Yeah, it was non- Really? Yeah. It was a real, and forgive me for the pun, it was a real passion project, right,

because he had wanted to make this for like twenty years, had tried and failed a bunch of times. Everybody in this movie is working for scale, or below it. And it's really like, I'm gonna make this deeply sincere religious film, and all of the movies about mob guys shooting each other are gonna pay for it. Not that they're not important, but this is what it's for. This was Martin Scorsese's Megalopolis, is what you're telling me. Yes! Yeah, absolutely it was his Megalopolis.

He wanted to make this for 25 years I'm seeing. Megalopolis brackets Catholic. That makes me like it more, I think. Like, well good for you, I'm glad you got to make your thing that I don't think I quite understand and get, but I'm glad you got to do it. Yeah, well we'll get to it. But like I say, I think it is really funny that we did this instead of any of the mob ones first. We'll get to those, I'm sure, y'know, maybe we'll get a slightly more narrowly defined

organized crime season, but um... I think that comes under crime season, but... I think that comes under robbery season, right? Oh yeah, there's definitely robbery. Like, Goodfellas is mostly about robberies, yeah, sure. This is Godfellas, though. That's true. This is Godfellas, indeed.

So we start with... We need our first fellas of God. Yes. Well, we start with the opening titles, which I really like because they're quite austere, where you just get like, cicadas, right? Like crickets, right? And this kind of like, nature, sort of like... Soundscape, sound bath! Exactly!

And then it just cuts off completely and you get the title card, silence, with the silence, which is very silent. Would have been very effective if I'd been watching it in a cinema, instead of on my sort of cum speckled laptop screen. Don't... Buy some screen wipes, woman. You gotta clean your screen! I literally, I have, you can just buy them.

My screen is very clean, you know me. Uh huh, I do. Nonetheless, I'm gonna be thinking about the phrase cum speckled laptop screen for the rest of the episode. So. But we open on Liam Neeson, Qui-gon-jin himself, looking quite Qui-gon-jin, cause he's got the hair grown out in the robes. Who is having a bad time, let's say. ALICE Yeah.

One of the worst times, actually, I'd say. It's Japan, it's 1633, so it's about half past four. And Christians are being boiled alive. Slowly. Yeah. It's a very creative form of torture, this. Oh yeah, it's sadistic. And there's a lot of sadistic torture in this.

It is a movie about violence in part, right? I watched this on Amazon.com, which means I got to see my favourite character right away, which is, man speaking Japanese subtitle over the subtitle that said what he was saying in Japanese. I hate it so much. Thank you so much Amazon for doing that to me every fucking time I try to watch a movie. I didn't get the translation, I just got man speaking Japanese and I was like, okay. Wonderful.

He is doing that. He sure is. So they're torturing several Christians and they are making Liam Neeson watch, right? And over this you get the voiceover of a letter that Liam Neeson is writing to his boss in Macown, who we will see later. God. Yeah. No, his line manager, right, who's another priest.

And a few interesting things here, right, he notes that the priests who are being tortured in these hot springs, asked to be tortured, so that they could demonstrate the strength of their faith and the presence of God within them. And then you note that Liam Neeson is not being tortured, and you go, hmm, what does that say about him that he didn't, right, and instead is being made to watch. Another thing I really like that's quite sort of a quiet detail is, he's being, it's a really tightly framed shot on him, and he's being held by two guards, and one of the guards is like visibly disturbed by what he's seeing by all the torture, and

is like uncomfortable. And they don't do anything with that, it doesn't go anywhere, I like that there's just a little kind of detail of conscience, y'know? Yeah. So they're putting boiling water from the hot springs into a kind of colander on the end of a stick, and then they sort of give these priests a very, very hot shower. Yeah. And it's all like steam and mist, which gives Martin Scorsese a lot of freedom to use those in his compositions. And boy is he, every shot in this movie is beautiful. At least the ones you can see are. Yes. We'll get to that. We'll get to some of the inside scenes later, yeah.

He writes this letter back to two of the lads, the boys of all time. It's Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver. Fuck yeah it is. Looking alarmingly young and alarmingly thin as very very young priests. They're being read this letter by, again, line manager, Father Valignano. Kieran Hines, guy we love today. LUCY Welcome back! Welcome back, sinister religious figure returning once again, Kieran Hines. ALICE Absolutely!

It's really good of it. LUCY That's the devil from Ghost Rider 2! ALICE We kinda do Ghost Rider 2. ALICE The thing I really like is that you merge Liam Neeson's voiceover of his letter and Kieran Hines reading it, and they merge together on the line. ["We only grow stronger in his love." Which is good, it's a little bit freaky getting it in stereo, but I like the approach there. So these two priests are...

Liam Neeson was their mentor, right? They were his padawans. And he- Yeah. That's how Jesuits work, right? They were his padawans. JADE Yeah. ALICE Yeah. ALICE And he- JADE That's how Jesuits work, right? Yeah. ALICE Yeah, pretty much. Like, I mean, I mean, of the things that have ripped off the Catholic Church for artistic inspiration, you've got to also put Star Wars on the list, I'm afraid. So yeah.

JADE Definitely. ALICE Um, we'll get to like, Warhammer 40k in another movie, probably. JADE Mm-hmm. ALICE So, yeah, they were his padawans, he was their teacher, their confessor, and he has disappeared in Japan. This was the last letter he sent, which was, uh, it's not going great cause people are getting tortured. Niamh- And this was years ago, cause they didn't have email.

LORENZO Yeah, they had to like, smuggle the letter all the way back to Macau. ALICE Yeah, and Valignarna was like, I heard a rumor when I got this letter that Ferrera, Liam Neeson, has apostatized, right, he had denied God, he had renounced his faith in public, and... FAUSTIN And is now living as a Japanese. ALICE Which, you only live twice, jokes, sprite themselves. NICCO He's gone entirely Japanese!

ALICE He has gone entirely Japanese. He has gone entirely Japanese, yes. Cautionary tale. Yeah, he's gone, well he's kind of gone native actually. Yeah, he's like, we cannot forgive this rather odd mixture of styles, because you're not supposed to do that. And the- Yeah, can you explain to me a little bit about like, cause I don't have a concept for how

bad that this is? Cause when I was just like, well if it's like a choice between denying your faith or get tortured to death, I would have thought it's entirely reasonable to go, yes actually I think I'll just live here and be happy. So how bad is this in like, Jesuit land? This is the kind of theological dispute at the heart of the movie. This is the core of it I believe. Yeah.

Yeah, we can get right into it. But so like, ordinarily, apostasy is like, it's real bad, right? You get excommunicated automatically kind of thing. What they're talking about here, they are talking about whether or not Ferrera is damned eternally and is going to go to hell off of this, right? Which is partially why the two priests are like, well we don't believe it, right? It can't be true, we don't want to just concede that he is going to die in apestate and go to hell, right?

But I guess what I'm wondering is, because we see they're like, we're gonna go to Japan and we're gonna find him, what I'm wondering is, is this like a Rambo 2 situation where like, we're going to go and get him back? Or is this like a, we're going to go and get him and like make him a prisoner because now he's done a crime? There's, I mean, Andrew Garfield's character, Rodriguez goes like, he's talking about even if this guy is still alive and has apostatized, we need to get to him so that he can rejoin the faith. Yeah, it's Rambo 2. Yeah, it is Rambo 2.

Rambo 2, okay. I think you know the deal at this point. If you want to hear the rest of that episode of Kill James Bond, you're gonna have to head on over to our Patreon, patreon.com slash Kill James Bond, all one word, and sign up today for as little as £5 a month.