Claim Ownership5 Star Tossers
Subscribed: 1Played: 51
Subscribe
© 2026 5 Star Tossers
Description
Playful academic podcast that looks at movies and other cultural objects through the lens of 5 groovy themes: Pervs 'R Us, Beast & Sovereign, Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais, Marx Grudge, and What Would Jesus Do?
69 Episodes
Reverse
In this episode we discuss the new horror film Barbarian. Marx Grudge returns as we think about the horrors of private property, specifically the home and real estate. We reference a blog post by the scholar Jason Read to follow this track, while trying our best to tie the thread of property relations to he other thread that runs through the movie: sexual difference and its constituent violence. These threads did not come together so neatly, maybe that's because Freud has a Marx Grudge just l...
Hello faithful listener! This Tossers episode tries to air-out the particularly pungent elements in the bad-air Ressentiment of 'Inceldom.' The incel, in our approach, may indicate the site of real pain and therefore allow insight for the very real crisis of heterosexual masculinity, its burning need of transvaluing behaviors that society can no longer abide. Certainly not for the faint of heart, or the trigger-happy. Now just pop a red pill and listen We talk about the fantasy of aut...
They say that one of the high-society ladies that was familiar with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (and his character) said, after he died, that he was an intriguing madman. In this episode, we delve head first into Nathan Fielder's foldy-folds, whether torture chambers, traps, or some choice slices of life (if you look there you can see Nathan's symptom holding the machete). Between the sketch(y) comedy and HBO's NDAs, our discussion seems to oscillate from wondering what makes the joke, to wh...
Once again, we had to shove way too many words into our title, but we swear, we touch on all of these figures in our long awaited return from Summer Break. Cutting into David Cronenberg's new film "Crimes of the Future," we append ourselves to Paul Preciado's Testo Junkie and Jacques Derrida's Beast and Sovereign: Seminar I. An overarching question we ask is whether this film can be a strident affirmation of Trans Politics if it stages the growth of new hormones and new organs without s...
In this episode we discuss the 2011 Quentin Dupieux film Rubber. It's the story of a killer tire. Jake suggested this movie after reading Eugenie Brinkema's affect-breaking book Life-Destroying Diagrams. She is all about the horror of form or the form of horror. The thing is, Sagi and Jack found the movie pointless--but isn't that the point of having a tire (a circle, a hole) be the star of the show? We discuss Brinkema, spectatorship, and general questions about taste on this road trip. Sta...
Hello everyone! You're still here?! This podcast we're discussing and dissecting Tiger, a 2021 HBO mini-series about the rise and Fall of Tiger Phallus.. sorry, I mean Tiger Woods. Tiger's superhuman abilities are analyzed from an Oedipus Complex angle, leading us to speculate about how Earl (and his wife) had tweaked its mechanism to create the perfect golfing machine; the kind that plays golf in a manner closer to that of a machine or a person in the throes of a PTSD symptom. Something sim...
Oh boy. Jack introduced us to To Catch A Predator. So we try to define Perverted Justice, which is the name of the STING company that catches the predators. Jesus makes a cameo, there's some Derrida, and a whole bunch of Americana sanctimony. We try not to spend too much time imitating Chris Hansen's voice. https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9
In this slightly longer episode we tackle Gillian Flynn's and David Fincher's Gone Girl (2014), as a heteronormative woman's violent breakaway from a 'type' that she feels pulled towards in her marriage - unusual, impolite, homicidal, spectacular. Channeling Valerie Solanas' Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM) - allowing this monstrosity to unfold on its own terms - reveals an inversion to existing 'types' and power dynamics in modern western heteronormative marriages. The male's distance-fant...
We thought to explore various kill-shots in the video arena. Come one come all and listen as serious discussions of Freud's death-drive and Japanese Orientalism devolve into a mayhem of body parts and Semen. We tried to go beyond the pleasure principle, where no man had gone before, but some of us gripped firmly unto the edge and would not release. It all spun out of control Pervs R' Us style. Jake had a blast though. Pun?.. What pun?! https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4...
Sagi introduces us to the world of scambaiting, where YouTube content creators scam scammers. We discuss the dubious ethics of these scambaiters and compare it to the Hacker Ethos of free information. We defend the honor of the Indian scammers who get scammed and the Grandmas who these scambaiters often pretend to be. We also fess up about some scams we have fallen for. There's lots of Marx Grudge and Beast and Sovereign here, Enjoy! https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8g...
In this glorious installment we will be continuing our actor/acting thematic, this time thinking of Franz Kafka's 1922 short story Ein Hungerkünstler. Slog along as we tarry a bit over the slim, somewhat Marxist contribution of the character's Pathos with regards to the reactionary-soporific functions of the Theater. But then, rejoice with the tragic overabundance of life, as we broach the fracking of Mount Sinai, interrogate false prophets of Dionysian intoxication, a...
The Tossers obsess over the final scene of a Seinfeld episode (Season 6, Episode 23), where an actor bombs on stage and begs the audience to let her start again. Why, we wonder, is it impossible for her to start again? Why is the audience so cruel? Maybe she can start again? Along the way, we discuss Shakespeare, Hannah Gadsby, Aristotle's Catharsis, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, and Nietzsche's fear that actors now rule the world. https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj...
5 Star Tossers throw up their first video game toss, focusing on Bioshock Infinite, the 3rd installation of the Bioshock series. They debate whether there's racism in the way the Black uprising is portrayed. They also get lost in the pleasure they take in gameplay, wondering whether a video game's story is all that important. https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9
Tossers turn to Julia Kristeva's abject to think about how repellant Megan Fox actually is in the 2009 film Jennifer's Body. Does she upset the hipster male gaze of the band Low Shoulder, or does she confirm its innermost secret? We also reference the SNL clip called The Librarian with Margot Robbie. https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9
5 Star Tossers throw some Hegel and Isaiah Berlin at you, in the name of freedom. There's Positive Freedom, Negative Freedom, Absolute Freedom, and then the Good Ole' U.S. of A brand: don't tread on my property. Oh yeah, this is all framed around the Always Sunny in Philadelphia Episode entitled "Charlie Goes America All Over Everybody's Asses" https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9
5 Star Tossers try to make sense of the Paul Verhoeven "Masterpiece of Shit" "Showgirls." Did we? We sure wrestled over it, and we churned out some humiliating memories, some Marxist feminist theories à la Silvia Federici, a hypothesis about the difference between satirizing violence and satirizing sex, a theory of the hoax, and we introduce Deleuze's cinematic concept "the crystalline element." https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9
The Five Star Tossers joyfully lambaste the Béla Tarr movie The Turin Horse. This leads them to think about what happens when you try to mash Marxist and Nietzschean ideas together. https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9
This week The 5 Star Tossers look at the cultural phenomenon that is the Golden Buzzer from America's Got Talent. We do a shallow deep dive into Kant's Critique of Judgment to think about the Christian humanism at the heart of any universal celebration of beauty and talent. We also introduce for the first time our Star il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais, so expect some Saussurean talk about fracking the signifier. Also, if you want to meet someone who thinks Susan Boyle can't sing, we somehow m...
We look at Werner Herzog's fascinating film Grizzly Man. Herzog compiles and analyzes the footage Timothy Treadwell filmed when he traveled to Alaska each summer for 13 years to live with Grizzly bears. We think about the colonizing tendencies in both Herzog and Treadwell, and discuss, via Jacques Derrida, the fabled relation between man and animal. Jake's Databyss notes: https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9
We discuss Eyes Wide Shut from a psychoanalytic angle. Specifically, we discuss the closing line of the movie by way Jacques Lacan's provocative statement that "There is No Sexual Relation." Here is the link to Jake's Databyss notes for the Podcast: https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9
Comments
Download from Google Play
Download from App Store
United States