Death is a Photograph

This week, the DPP lads are joined by David Jamieson, journalist and editor of Conter Scot to discuss Mel Gibson's 1995 epic Braveheart.
What does a botched historical drama about Scotland's First War of Independence (1296-1328) by an American-Australian traditionalist Catholic tell us about the political conscioussness of Gen X and the contemporary American right? What does, and did, freedom mean to those born in the 1960s and 1970s?
Find out in today's episode.
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This week on DPP the boys sit down with Eddie Averill, formerly of Extended Clip, now of Vintage Violence, to investigate Paul Thomas Anderson's LA epic Magnolia (1999). Is Hollywood an American virus? Is TV the Gen-X brain bug? Dig in with Chase, Sam, and Eddie to find out.

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This week, DPP is joined by poet, podcaster, author, and host of Varn Vlog — C. Derick Varn — to discuss Richard Linklater's non-linear, slice-of-a-generation classic, Slacker (1990).
Set in the suburbs of Austin, Texas, Slacker follows an interwoven set of 20 and 30-somethings, doing, well, not exactly much. This is pre-techlord and podcaster Austin. However, Linklater still captures glimmers of the hipster explosion that is to come in the characters of Slacker — conspiracy theorists, anarchists, conceptual artists, skaters, post-punk drummers, etc.
In 2026, we live in a world where Gen X's children across much of the western world, and increasingly the far east, are out of work, out of education and on the scrap heap (NEETs, lying flat etc). If Gen Z are structurally excluded from much of the work force, Gen X conciouslessly opted-out.
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This week, the DPP lads are joined by writer, critic and marketing director at publishing house Deep Vellum (and friend of the pod) Jon Repetti — to discuss Spike Lee's 1999 crime thriller Summer of Sam.
Summer of Sam revolves around the fallout from a real-life killing spree committed by David Berkowitz between 1975 and 1977.
Lee's 1999 feature is an odd combination of 1970s nostalgia aimed at a young Gen X, combined with subcultural analysis and crime thriller tropes. The film delves into the urban psychogeography of New York City's outer boroughs and ethnic neighbourhoods — at a time when NYC was widely considered to be in decline, yet also experiencing a huge cultural flourishing of underground scenes, musical creativity, and club life.
Does Gen X's childhood fear of the city and the urban, in the 1970s, translate into today's pervasive paranoia about large American cities? Find out in today's episode.
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This week, Chase and Sam at DPP are joined by architecture critic and writer Owen Hatherley to discuss British director Patrick Keiller’s London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997).
​London and Robinson in Space form the first two parts of the decade-long Robinson trilogy. Keiller's two essay films capture Britain during the interregnum between Thatcher and Blair — an oft-forgotten period, after the end of the Cold War, but before the short-lived ecstasies of Cool Britannia.
​Keiller charts a country still very much in thrall to tradition, mediating its own decline, and with a surprisingly intact industrial base. Both films feature an unnamed narrator who journeys around England with an unseen accomplice: the titular Robinson (a permanently precarious academic). Keiller’s camera lingers over petrol stations, suburban business parks and other liminal spaces — a post-Thatcherite, globalised, netherworld of commercial utilitarianism.
Through a patched-together series of shots and reams of economic data, Keiller, arguably, makes the case that Gen X, not the boomers, were the UK's last industrial generation: squatting over the final flames of manufacturing during the rule of John Major — the infamous prime ministerial 'grey man.'
Major and Blair haunt the background of Keiller's work, bookending the period his films explore. The former is presented as a bland technocrat at the End of History, the latter a representative of American-style personality politics. Keiller's films place us in a British interregnum — and, to steal a line from Gramsci, 'morbid symptoms' are everywhere.
​Hatherley is the author of several books, including Militant Modernism, Trans-Europe Express, Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London, Modern Buildings in Britain: A Gazetteer and, his latest, The Alienation Effect (out now with Penguin).
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