Death is a Photograph

DPP is back, baby — and this time for an encore. Chase and Sam thought they'd round out the season — find a 'capstone', if you will — for the last year. That pediment takes the form of Chris Smith's fly-on-the-wall documentary American Movie (1999). What does it mean to aspire towards creative production as a provincial dreamer-cum-slacker? What was left of the American dream as the clock ticked over and a new millennium began? Find out in today's episode.

Out of Office

Fear the coming of the trilby. Yes, that's right — today, in the last episode of our first season, we're looking at Gen X accelerating towards middle age and a crash encounter with those coming up behind them: millennials. No one captured this dissonant first encounter better than Noah Baumbach in his 2014 feature While We're Young — a spiralling comedy of manners obsessed with subcultures, technology, filmmaking, ethics, and the process of ageing itself. Were the millennials the horrific spawn of a shallow age? Solopistic, self-involved, far too comfortable with 'selling out?' Or were they a pioneering generation, with enough earnestness and purchasing power to transform cities, fashion, media and art — at least sometimes — for the better? Find out in today's episode.

Patreon here. It's the early 2000s in Mexico — and everyone is feelin' fine. The PRI's uninterrupted one-party 71-year reign of social-democratic, but also neoliberal, authoritarian incompetence is over. The insanity of the drug war proper, unleashed in 2006, is a distant spot on the horizon. A guy with the last name Fox is in charge — he's like George Bush but with even more charisma...and a strange penchant for coke (a cola). Yes, that's right — today's episode of DPP is covering the defining, break-out films of the Nuevo Cine Mexicano — Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros and Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mama Tambien . Or as Chase has characterised them — a pairing about female predatory behaviour and animal cruelty. How was the USA's closest neighbour feeling about the End of History? Dread, joy? The irrepressible need to engage in dog fighting? Find out in today's episode.

Patreon here. This week, DP heads south. South to Chile — a nation which ended its military junta and dictatorship through an advertising-powered referendum just as the Cold War was ending. Could there be material that's more End of History in its politics? Chilean director Pablo Larraín seemed to think not — producing his 2012 feature No — half as a celebration of the 1988 presidential referendum's ousting of General Pinochet, and half as a satirical send-up of the growth of political communications through advertising. What happens when politics is stripped of its substance and rendered as a performative set of vibes? Find out in today's episode.

Patreon here . This week DPP delves into Guy Ritchie's feature debut Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). What did the 1990s rebirth of Cockney-cool during the Blair era mean for Gen X? How did London feel just before the turn of the 21st century? And why are British-gangster movie directors so posh? Find out in today's episode.

Patreon and full episode here. In the second of DPP's special book episodes, Sam and Chase interview Yale Law and History professor Samuel Moyn on his new book Gerontocracy in America: How the Old are Hoarding Power and Wealth – and What to Do About It (2026). For how much longer will the Boomers and Silent Generation rule America? And how does their dominance differ from historical gerontocracies from Sparta to the Soviet Union? What levers does the US government and US democracy actually have to prevent gerontocracy from continuing? Find out in today's episode.

Patreon here. This week, DPP explores the cult film — Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered (2001). Panned at the time by venerable critics like Roger Ebert — Freddy Got Fingered has only grown in influence in the last two decades, generating a reputation as the ur-Gen X slacker and freak-out comedy. Is this a piece of Dada genius or a symptom of the Hollywood studio system indulging the worst tendencies of a generation? Find out in today's episode.

Patreon here. This week, the DPP lads head east — to the wild years of Russia in the 1990s after the fall of communism. That's right — we're talking about 1997's gangster coming-of-age feature Brat by Aleksei Balabanov , a film that explores Russia at a turning point: between the drunken post-Communist years of Yeltsin and the rising authoritarianism of Putin. To paraphrase Gramsci — "the crisis consists precisely in the fact that Boris is dying and Vladimir cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

DPP ventures into the North Chicago suburbs as it broaches its first John Hughes film — Sixteen Candles (1984). What does adolescence look like in the affluent upper middle classes for Gen X? What role does the family play? What did dating look like for those coming of age in the epoch? Find out in today's episode.

Patreon here. This week, the DPP boys check out Reginald Hudlin's 1990 House Party . The film launched a long-running series of coming-of-age comedies under the House Party title, terminating in 2023. Centring around the exploits of rap duo Kid n' Play, the film did much to introduce hip-hop into the American mainstream. It also foregrounds African American middle-class suburban life on film in a groundbreaking way. Where did the film's subtle hints at pan-Africanism and 1990s affluence lead in the 2000s and 2010s? Find out in today's episode.

To access the full episode — subscribe to our Patreon . In the first of DPP's special book episodes, Sam interviews Oxford politics lecturer and NYT contributing writer Anton Jäger on his new book: Hyperpolitics (2026, Verso) . Jäger's text is an expansion of two essays: ' From Bowling Alone to Posting Alone ' (2022) and ' Everything is Hyperpolitical ' (2023). Through an analysis of political change in the late 20th and 21st centuries and the curation of various cultural objects: the novels of Michel Houellebecq and Annie Ernaux, plus the photos of Wolfgang Tillmans, Jäger makes the case for five types of politics immediately before, and after, the 'end of history.' These sequential stages are 1920s-1940s mass politics (high politicisation and high institutionalisation), 1950s institutional politics (medium politicisation and high institutionalisation), 1990s and 2000s post-politics (low politicisation and low institutionalisation), 2010s anti-politics (medium politicisation and low institutionalisation), and, finally, 2020s hyperpolitics (high politicisation and low institutionalisation). Has the 'end of history' really ended — or are the 2020s just a continuation of 1990s deinstitutionalisation with more posting? Find out in today's episode.

Patreon is here. Today's DPP episode explores the little-known 1994 feature by multi-media artist Jessica Hagedorn – Fresh Kill . Recycling, sushi, yuppies, toxic waste, nameless megacorporations, ethical hacking – Staten Island – Fresh Kill has it all, wrapped up in a dissonant prose-poem of a script. But did the world really turn into the endlessly diffused and globalised set of networks that Hagedorn predicts? Find out in today's episode.

Find our patreon here . The DPP boys were picking through the flea markets of Berlin — looking for Trabant car parts and old jars of Spreewaldgurken. In amongst the clutter, we came across a dusty videotape — Goodbye, Lenin! (2003). Wolfgang Becker's breakout hit — a deep dive into Ostalgie — only a few years after German reunification — asks the question: what if you could keep living in a dead political system and world? How possible is it to protect ourselves from the shocks of capitalism, to retreat into nostalgia? Find out in today's episode.

Like, rate, and subscribe at our patreon – here. This week, DPP delve into the high school comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). The film, directed by Amy Heckerling and based on the gonzo reporting of Cameron Crowe, is a vignette of teenage life in suburban southern California in the 1980s. With Reagan in power, plentiful jobs, and easy credit, what did adolescence look like for a broad swathe of the American population not normally depicted in films, for lack of interest and dramatic effect? (i.e the Californian middle class). And what was the texture of life like in the early 1980s, before the neoliberal turn had had its full effect on the same group of people? Find out in today's episode.

Chase is solo on this episode with guest Andrew Young to discuss i ♥ huckabees, an under-the-radar feature film by early Gen-X wunderkind David O. Russell. NIMBYism, environmentalism, cod-psychology, adolescent existentialism, self-help, the fear of suburbia, ecological doom, space-hoppers – i ♥ huckabees has it all. Where does a generation go when questions of material survival have been answered? Find out in today's episode. Patreon, as always, is here.

Subscribe to DPP's patreon. This week, DPP takes on Gen X myth-making about the city of Manchester – namely, through Michael Winterbottom's 2002 film 24 Hour Party People . Why did Manchester explode as a Gen X-era subcultural and music mecca in the 1980s and 1990s, overtaking places more central to the boomer consciousness like Liverpool? And how did those involved in the post-punk and acid-house scenes of the era understand the sociology and economics of the epoch in retrospect? Find out in today's episode.

Connect with us on Patreon . DPP journeys to the Garden State, and Chase's political domain, this week — that's right, we're covering slacker favourites Clerks (1994) and Clerks II (2006). Directed by Kevin Smith, these films explore what it's like to spend a decade working marginal, dead-end jobs, without actively identifying oneself as marginal or a failure, because you've got your friends, pop culture, and ever-present escape routes. Were the lifestyles exhibited in Smith’s oeuvre only possible during a brief period at the end of history? Find out in today’s episode.

Subscribe to our Patreon here . The DPP boys head back up to Scotland (we can't keep away), in search of meaning in deindustrialised hellscapes — that's right, we're doing Trainspotting (1996) and Danny Boyle's lesser-known follow-up: T2 (2017). Is there any compensation for the full-scale loss of meaning, association and community brought about by the offshoring of manufacturing and the rise of finance? Individualism, punk rock, raves, heroin — EU redevelopment funds? Listen to this week's episode to find out.

Subscribe on Patreon . In the first of our solo episodes this season, the DPP boys sit down, shut their asses up, and listen to Gen X women in the workplace, specifically Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow and Alanna Ubach in Jill Sprecher's 1997 office comedy Clockwatchers . If Office Space, Fight Club and Falling Down express a male rage at deindustrialisation, the meaninglessness of white collar work, and arbitrary hierarchies — that is very much still with us — what does Clockwatchers have to say about the first generation of women (1965-1980) partaking equally (at least formally and legally) in the professional labour market? Interestingly, Sprecher's female leads couldn't be further from the 'Lean In' feminism of Sheryl Sandberg that came to dominate the 2010s — and in many ways they share more with their Gen X male analogues (Tyler Durden, Peter Gibbons) than might, at first, be expected. Because, of course, everyone (no matter your identity marker) can agree that "work sucks." Find out in today's episode.