WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:03.500 cosmology in a very interesting and subversive way. 00:04.400 --> 00:09.640 The subject is actually never discussed or even alluded to until the last few minutes 00:09.640 --> 00:14.580 of the movie, but becomes central to the big twist and climax of the plotline. 00:15.540 --> 00:20.520 When the final reveal happens and the audience learns the truth, Flat Earth is front and 00:20.520 --> 00:23.160 center of that revelation in an ingenious way. 00:23.860 --> 00:28.540 Reading and listening to interviews, I haven't been able to find if Yorgos Lathimos is 00:28.540 --> 00:34.460 a Flat Earther himself, sympathetic to the idea, or simply included it tongue-in-cheek, 00:34.980 --> 00:39.660 but I found the way it was utilized in the film to be a great example of how this topic 00:39.660 --> 00:43.200 can be effectively introduced and included in modern artwork. 00:43.920 --> 00:49.140 If you haven't seen Bagonia yet and plan to watch it at some point, I recommend pausing 00:49.140 --> 00:54.140 the video here as I will be discussing the plot including major spoilers for the film. 00:54.920 --> 01:00.700 The movie opens with protagonists Teddy and his autistic cousin Don tending to their 01:00.700 --> 01:06.680 hives of bees, doing their morning yoga routine, and plotting to abduct a pharmaceutical company 01:06.680 --> 01:13.100 CEO whom they believe to be an alien, specifically a member of the malevolent species known 01:13.100 --> 01:14.320 as Andromedans. 01:15.160 --> 01:19.840 Teddy and Don are convinced that these Andromedans are killing off the world's 01:20.680 --> 01:23.620 poisoning communities and enslaving humanity. 01:24.360 --> 01:30.760 Throughout the film, Teddy and Don are shown to be lower-class, unkempt social misfits with 01:30.760 --> 01:35.400 a checkered past, manic, confused, and heads full of conspiracy theories. 01:36.100 --> 01:41.540 They are not presented as reliable narrators, and every claim they make sounds questionable 01:41.540 --> 01:42.320 at best. 01:43.180 --> 01:49.400 In contrast, we're shown the antagonist Michelle Fuller, CEO of Oxalith Pharmaceutical 01:49.400 --> 01:56.420 Corporation, doing yoga in her modern upper-class mansion, having a morning facial, a private 01:56.420 --> 02:00.440 self-defense lesson, and confidently strutting into her corner office. 02:01.460 --> 02:07.580 Michelle is cool, calm, and collected, a rehearsed corporate kind of friendly, but seemingly much 02:07.580 --> 02:10.560 more relatable and level-headed than our protagonists. 02:11.280 --> 02:17.420 Ultimately, Teddy and Don succeed in kidnapping Michelle as planned and imprison her in 02:17.420 --> 02:17.860 their basement. 02:18.780 --> 02:25.280 Believing her hair to be telepathic antennas facilitating communication with her alien mothership, 02:25.720 --> 02:32.180 Teddy and Don shave Michelle completely bald, then cover her from head to toe with an antihistamine 02:32.180 --> 02:38.140 cream, which they insist will prevent her from sending out a distress signal to other Andromedans. 02:38.800 --> 02:43.600 Teddy then explains that she has four days to negotiate a meeting with her emperor 02:43.600 --> 02:49.500 before an upcoming lunar eclipse which will allow the Andromedan mothership to enter Earth's 02:49.500 --> 02:50.780 atmosphere undetected. 02:51.740 --> 02:57.320 Since Michelle refuses to admit that she's an alien, or confirm any of Teddy's wild assertions, 02:57.780 --> 03:02.940 he proceeds to tie her up to an electroshock machine and torture her until she confesses. 03:03.660 --> 03:08.500 Instead of confessing, however, she withstands the highest output the machine can produce, 03:08.980 --> 03:12.200 which causes Teddy to completely change his mind and behavior. 03:12.720 --> 03:18.080 He quickly releases Michelle from her restraints and apologizes, saying that her incredibly 03:18.080 --> 03:23.420 high pain tolerance is evidence that she's actually part of the Andromedan royal family. 03:24.280 --> 03:30.280 At this point, a confused Michelle is invited upstairs for dinner and now treated as a special 03:30.280 --> 03:35.240 guest, where she strategically admits to being an alien and answers his strange 03:35.240 --> 03:37.100 questions until she can escape. 03:37.900 --> 03:42.660 I won't go into detail about the remainder of the plot, except to say that the film does 03:42.660 --> 03:48.760 everything it can to continue setting up Teddy as being an unhinged, schizophrenic conspiracy 03:48.760 --> 03:54.900 theorist with wild ideas about this one woman, and this one woman doing everything she can 03:54.900 --> 03:58.360 to survive her deluded kidnapper's bipolar mood swings. 03:59.200 --> 04:04.080 When Michelle eventually survives and escapes from Teddy, in the last five minutes 04:04.080 --> 04:11.120 of the film, we the audience finally see Michelle aboard her mothership, confirming the fact 04:11.120 --> 04:17.020 that she was really an alien the whole time, and Teddy's seemingly wild delusions were 04:17.020 --> 04:17.900 totally correct. 04:18.820 --> 04:24.080 Then she stands before a holographic model of a flat earth with a gaseous dome 04:24.080 --> 04:25.300 firmament covering it. 04:26.040 --> 04:31.160 She takes a pointed instrument in her hand and pokes the flat earth dome until it 04:31.160 --> 04:32.720 pops, then walks away. 04:33.940 --> 04:39.500 Upon taking this action we then see that on earth everyone has instantly dropped dead. 04:40.660 --> 04:44.580 Several shots show deceased sailors afront a flat horizon. 04:45.520 --> 04:50.360 One particularly interesting shot shows a room full of school children sitting 04:50.360 --> 04:55.180 dead in their school desks with a prominent model globe earth hanging from the 04:55.180 --> 04:55.460 ceiling. 04:55.460 --> 05:01.700 Another shot shows a businessman sitting in his final resting place afront a 05:01.700 --> 05:02.820 massive globe sculpture. 05:03.800 --> 05:09.580 Bagonia was actually based on a 2003 Korean film called Save the Green Planet, 05:10.080 --> 05:14.100 and one of the noticeable changes from that original version is this 05:14.100 --> 05:15.580 inclusion of the flat earth. 05:16.400 --> 05:20.140 In Save the Green Planet, when the Andromedan returns to the mothership 05:20.140 --> 05:24.620 and destroys the earth, the earth is depicted as a globe and explodes 05:24.620 --> 05:26.960 similar to the Death Star in Star Wars. 05:27.680 --> 05:33.420 In Bagonia the flat earth, insects, and animals all survive, but by puncturing 05:33.420 --> 05:36.760 a hole in the gaseous firmament only the humans perish. 05:37.760 --> 05:42.600 Exactly what this means is open to speculation, but it goes to show how 05:42.600 --> 05:44.820 important this truth could potentially be. 05:45.720 --> 05:49.460 People love to scoff at flat earthers asking what does it matter 05:49.460 --> 05:51.700 whether the earth is flat or a globe anyways? 05:51.700 --> 05:56.840 The answer is that it's not so much about the shape as it is about the 05:56.840 --> 05:58.020 scale of the lie. 05:59.040 --> 06:03.860 If humanity is deluded by a lie of this magnitude, there are innumerable 06:03.860 --> 06:08.700 varied and dire consequences for believing such a false cosmology, 06:09.400 --> 06:13.020 especially when there's a group of people actively working to 06:13.020 --> 06:14.800 indoctrinate the world with this lie. 06:15.820 --> 06:19.740 By adding this flat earth element to the end of Bagonia, it takes 06:19.740 --> 06:23.640 the viewer through a two hour experience of confirmation bias, 06:24.220 --> 06:27.820 only to end in the same kind of complete cognitive dissonance 06:28.300 --> 06:32.800 experienced by people who do their due diligence in researching flat 06:32.800 --> 06:36.260 earth and finally realize that it's absolutely true. 06:37.240 --> 06:40.540 You become like Teddy in a world that sees everything Teddy 06:40.540 --> 06:43.340 knows to be true as crazy and delusional. 06:43.940 --> 06:46.960 In that instant you see Michelle aboard her mothership. 06:46.960 --> 06:51.360 You receive the emotional impact of believing a lie for the past 06:51.360 --> 06:55.260 two hours and demonizing the protagonist in your mind because 06:55.660 --> 06:58.640 to you he seemed insane and deluded. 06:59.500 --> 07:03.220 Now of course this movie isn't going to convince anyone logically 07:03.220 --> 07:07.140 of flat earth's veracity but it does do a few interesting and 07:07.140 --> 07:09.860 advantageous things intellectually and emotionally. 07:10.740 --> 07:14.660 Firstly, just having the flat earth model feature so prominently 07:14.660 --> 07:18.560 in a big Hollywood movie helps bring the subject to the forefront 07:18.560 --> 07:22.520 of consciousness. More importantly though, by having flat earth 07:22.520 --> 07:26.540 be this big reveal as part of the movie's twist where the viewer 07:26.540 --> 07:30.840 realizes their assumptions about the film characters have been wrong the entire 07:30.840 --> 07:34.880 time, we are shown that we were also wrong about our assumed 07:34.880 --> 07:36.780 cosmology the entire time. 07:37.580 --> 07:41.380 We are given the experience of confident confirmation bias 07:41.380 --> 07:45.700 ending in complete cognitive dissonance, the very thing that 07:45.700 --> 07:48.540 happens within every flat earther as they awaken. 07:49.560 --> 07:53.560 Due to our indoctrinations the very idea of flat earth sounds 07:53.560 --> 07:57.400 ridiculous and impossible just like Teddy and Don's theories 07:57.400 --> 08:00.700 about Michelle being an undercover and dromed in alien. 08:01.440 --> 08:05.480 Most viewers will barely even consider the possibility that Michelle 08:05.480 --> 08:09.260 is an alien just like most people who hear about flat earth 08:09.260 --> 08:13.500 don't actually consider it a viable possibility and dismiss it 08:13.500 --> 08:17.460 without any thought or research. By giving people this 08:17.460 --> 08:21.160 awakening experience even through the lens of an entertaining 08:21.160 --> 08:25.560 fictional movie, Bogonia successfully delivers the same 08:25.560 --> 08:29.360 kind of emotional impact and intellectual reappraisal of 08:29.360 --> 08:33.500 our assumptions about reality that every flat earther experiences.