Watch This: Mountainhead

Succession creator Jesse Armstrong is back with Mountainhead, a new movie with characters who are just as wealthy, powerful, and insecure as the Roy family. Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef and Cory Michael Smith star as four tech moguls gathering for a low-key guys' weekend of poker. But business and unchecked, overinflated egos quickly lead them all down a very dark path. https://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture/To access bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening for Pop Culture Happy Hour, subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+ at plus.npr.org/happy. https://plus.npr.org/happy Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/nprpopculture. https://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture/ See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Ray from Car Talk. Are you tired of all the depth and thoughtful care that goes into NPR shows? Want some good old fashioned goofing around and stumbling to figure out what's going on? Well, I've been taking occasional car questions again. You can hear them by signing up for NPR Plus, along with lots of other bonus content. Just go to plus.npr.org.

• 0:28Aisha Harris?

  Perhaps you're still going through succession withdrawal, two years after that hit HBO show concluded. You're in luck because creator Jesse Armstrong is back with Mountain Head, a new movie with new characters who are just as insanely wealthy, insanely powerful, and deeply insecure as the Roy family was.

• 0:46Linda Holmes?

  Four tech moguls gather for what's supposed to be a low-key guys' weekend of poker, and among them are Steve Carell and Jason Schwartzman. But business and unchecked overinflated egos quickly lead them all down a very dark path. I'm Linda Holmes.

• 1:04Aisha Harris?

  And I'm Aisha Harris. And today, we're talking about Mountain Head on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

• 1:14Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 1:18Speaker 04

  This week on Here and Now Anytime, in the closing days of the midterm elections, we're in Iowa and Arizona, two states where independent voters will decide who controls Congress for the next two years.

• 1:30Speaker 05

  Even though we're in a red district, we will get out the Democratic and independent vote. We will.

• 1:36Speaker 04

  Here and Now Anytime. Listen on the NPR app or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

• 1:43Speaker 06

  Happy fall. Yes, the days are getting shorter and colder, and the rain can be a drag. But this is also the perfect time of year to get cozy. Life Kit has lots of ideas so you can embrace the change of seasons, with episodes on everything from making soup to exercising outdoors. Listen to the Life Kit podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:06Speaker 07

  This is Terry Gross. Listen to Fresh Air for thoughtful questions, like when I asked Steven Spielberg about porn titles. When John Waters was on our show, he said his favorite was shaving Ryan's privates. Did you know about this? Uh, no. Not until this very moment. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts.

• 2:29Aisha Harris?

  Joining us today is one of the hosts of NPR's Code Switch podcast, Jean Demby. Welcome back, Jean.

• 2:35Speaker 08

  What's good, y'all? Oh, my God, I'm so excited to talk about this.

• 2:38Aisha Harris?

  I know. This is gonna be very fun, but as we were lamenting right before we started taping this, we will unfortunately not be able to drop any swear words in here. Yeah, it's true. This is a very, very swear-heavy movie, to be expected from Jesse Armstrong. So, Mountain Head, it's about a group of very rich frenemies who get together for a snowy mountain weekend hang. Hugo, aka Super, plays host in his newly-built mansion. He's played by Jason Schwartzman.

• 3:05Speaker 09

  Have these been pre-pitted? Yes. Which means that some little greasy monster from Whole Foods has had his little fingers in him, and I don't like that.

• 3:13Aisha Harris?

  Yes. Then there's Randall, played by Steve Carell. He's dealing with some health issues but is keeping it all under wraps.

• 3:20Speaker 10

  Cancer was net-net a big positive. Wisdom, 50% increase. Purpose, meaning, both way up.

• 3:29Aisha Harris?

  Ramy Youssef is Jeff. He amassed his wealth creating an AI he's convinced is for the good of humanity.

• 3:35Speaker 11

  I've got zero-shot learning and the essence of justice in a box, and you've got, what, 4chan on [BLEEP] acid? Awesome. I'm selling a filter for nightmares. That's not the kind of business that slows down.

• 3:48Aisha Harris?

  Ah, delusions, delusions of grandeur. And then there's Venice, played by Corey Michael Smith. He's another tech creator, and his platform just launched a new upgrade to its generative AI, which has directly led to mass chaos and violence across the globe.

• 4:03Speaker 12

  We're gonna show users as much [BLEEP] as possible until everyone realizes nothing's that [BLEEP] serious.

• 4:09Aisha Harris?

  Yeah.

• 4:10Speaker 13

  Nothing means anything, and everything's funny.

• 4:12Aisha Harris?

  Exactly.

• 4:13Speaker 13

  And cool.

• 4:13Aisha Harris?

  Precisely. Funny. As the rest of the world burns and the White House starts a callin', they conspire to seize the moment and profit off the turmoil, as one does. But cracks in their friendship begin to show and the vibes take quite a turn. Mountain Head is streaming on Max now. Linda, I hear tell that you really, really loved this. Tell us more, tell us more.

• 4:35Linda Holmes?

  I did, I really, really liked this. In fact, I've watched it twice. The first time I really liked it, the second time I really loved it. For essentially two independent reasons. One of which is, as you could hear in some of those clips, I think it's very, very funny. Jesse Armstrong, now before he was making Succession, has a long history in the Armando Iannucci arm of British comedy. And so he was comedy writer first, and this is much more of a dark comedy. Like farce, yeah. Much more purely that than Succession, which was sort of a mix of this really affecting drama with a lot of dark comedy. But I also think it is so insightful about why these guys are so useless.

• 5:17Linda Holmes?

  And the first thing you see is Venice in his car with some of his like, whatever hangers on, his team. And he does something that is not funny at all. And they all tell him how funny it is. And you realize that Armstrong's point about these guys is how, other than being rich, how fully unremarkable they are.

• 5:42Speaker 14

  Shall I put that? We can watch the full fat product globally and just be like, [BLEEP] with two U's. Uh, what about with like three U's? I don't know, I like two. Yeah, no, two, two is genius.

• 5:56Linda Holmes?

  Other than the Ramy Youssef character, who we can talk about a little bit, he's a little bit differently pitched than some of these guys. None of them are capable of being funny on purpose or witty on purpose. Everything they say sounds foolish. They are completely devoid of wisdom. They are utterly unremarkable, except for how much money they have. And I think in that sense, this is a bleak and brutal and unfortunately kind of feels horrible because it's true kind of movie to me. But I, I sort of loved the pain of it and the writing of it, which I just, oh my gosh, I do really, really love Jesse Armstrong's writing.

• 6:37Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, loved the pain, but put that, slap that on the.

• 6:41Linda Holmes?

  The poster for this movie.

• 6:43Speaker 08

  It hurts so good.

• 6:44Linda Holmes?

  It hurts so good. Gene, give me a vibe check here. How are you feeling about this?

• 6:49Speaker 08

  Oh, man, I really, really dug it. That scene that Linda just pointed to where they're in the car, and I guess it's like his chief of staff, or you know, his handlers. Sycophants, though. It reminded me of that detail in the new book, Careless People, which is, from a former Facebook insider's perspective, like what it was like to work with Zuckerberg and some of the other high-ups there. And she had this like detail about how Mark Zuckerberg, like everybody around him just let him win at board games all the time. Just to make him, you know, feel good about himself, you know? They never wanted to make him, you know, not think that he was like the smartest dude in the room. And that's clearly like where all these people are. Like, they've been, it's gone from the cocoon and then sniffing their own farts. And so all four of them, this quartet sort of gets together.

• 7:29Linda Holmes?

  Exactly.

• 7:30Speaker 08

  You know, for this boys' trip. And then there's this scene, it just feels very Succession, but like, of course, in Succession, it would be like a whole bunch of stuff leading up to it. But there's a scene like in the first maybe 20, 25 minutes of movie, in which this quartet is at the top of this mountain. They're comparing each other's net worths by like writing that number in lipstick on their chests. And so it's kind of like a pissing contest, but also like, it's giving like manifestation practice. It's giving like a little.

• 7:53Linda Holmes?

  Absolutely.

• 7:53Aisha Harris?

  Yes.

• 7:54Speaker 08

  Vision board energy, like they're shouting out the stuff they really want. You know what I mean?

• 7:57Linda Holmes?

  Hundred percent.

• 7:58Speaker 15

  Gentlemen, let us shout. Mountain God Accelerator Legacy Manifestation. Mountain God Accelerator Legacy Manifestation.

• 8:08Speaker 08

  It just was like so ridiculous in cartoonish. It was so funny.

• 8:12Linda Holmes?

  There's like light woo to how they talk, which is, I think, true to like.

• 8:18Speaker 08

  Exactly, right.

• 8:18Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, the light woo is a great description. It's also just like trying to convince yourselves of something that you don't even really believe in, right? Like, there is so much, this is a net positive. We're doing this for the good of the, of the world. And like, we're not really bad people. Like, even though we know that these people don't really care about anyone else, the fact that they feel like they need to. Seem as if they care or that they are actually contributing something good into the world is a really fascinating thing to sort of latch on to. I think I found myself both very entertained by this and very much enjoying it and very much especially appreciating how kind of off the deep end it goes because it does make a very sharp turn later in the movie. But at the end of it, I also felt like, I think I know how I feel about it as just

• 9:03Aisha Harris?

  like pure entertainment. I was entertained. Again, it did scratch that succession itch for me. And as far as this entire genre of we're gonna watch extremely rich people show the worst of themselves in this moment, that is a genre now from everything from Knives Out to pick your Nicole Kidman starring movie or TV show. Like, it's its own genre now. I think this is one of the better versions of it, but I also still felt like left it feeling like, and what? Like, was there anything new revealed that like hadn't been revealed to me over the course of, you know, four seasons of Succession or any other show?

• 9:42Speaker 08

  Or like walking around the world.

• 9:43Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, I just, yeah, I'm just like, oh, this is just also the news. There's value in that, but I also struggle with whether or not I actually, if I go back and watch this in five years, am I gonna be as entertained? I don't know. And that's what I'm struggling with personally.

• 9:57Linda Holmes?

  I will say, I don't think Succession really ever got into the question of why are these people so foolish? Because the people in Succession, particularly some of them, right? Shiv is not a foolish person. She's not a not smart person. She's just an amoral person.

• 10:16Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's right.

• 10:17Linda Holmes?

  It's the same thing with, at least Logan, I would say. There's a lot of Roman, I think, in the Ramy Youssef character Jeff.

• 10:26Aisha Harris?

  So much Roman, yeah.

• 10:28Linda Holmes?

  In that he really is funny and it's the thing that kind of keeps bringing you back and thinking maybe he's not quite so wicked because he is funny.

• 10:36Speaker 08

  Irredeemable, yeah.

• 10:37Linda Holmes?

  But I think what they do that Succession didn't do is they are kind of poking at what are some of the kind of toxic Things that they've begun to believe. There's actually a moment where Venice asks Randall, the Steve Carell character, do you believe in other people? And he's not saying, do you believe in the goodness of other people? Or do you think you can trust other people? He's really gotten to the point where he's saying, do you really think it's possible that there are billions of other people who are just as real as we are? He's genuinely starting to say, do you believe in other people? So I think exploring some of that's interesting. But even more than that, I watched this and I came away thinking about,

• 11:22Linda Holmes?

  okay, so this is why these guys are fools. Because how do you learn? If you are these guys, you can't learn from consequences, because for the most part, you don't experience any.

• 11:33Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, they have the White House on speed dial.

• 11:35Linda Holmes?

  Exactly. You can't learn from other people because nobody will tell you the truth. You can't learn from history because your exceptionalism about yourself makes you believe that what has happened historically doesn't have anything to do with you because there's never been anybody like you. And if you can't learn from consequences and you can't learn from other people and you can't learn from history, that's how you become a fool and stay a fool. And it's interesting because the Steve Carell character clearly has some actual, like, he's studied. He knows about certain things. He's interested in philosophy and ancient history and stuff like that. He's only, he only cares about certain things.

• 12:18Linda Holmes?

  Like, he's kind of studied it to kind of pull out morsels about greatness, in a way.

• 12:23Speaker 10

  My view, and it's essentially a Galian, is that the whole of history operates on the [BLEEP] what cool principle. Bronze, what oh cool civilization. Iron, what oh cool empire.

• 12:39Aisha Harris?

  He's the wooiest of them all.

• 12:40Linda Holmes?

  He's the wooiest of them. But the rest of them, you just get the sense that their worlds are limited to what they're doing in these businesses. And that's why they're fools. And I did find that to be an interesting insight. That I don't think you got as much from Succession because that was more about morality than it was about people just being absolutely devoid of insight about anything.

• 13:07Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, that's fair. And I think it also makes a difference that Steve Carell is the oldest out of all of those characters, you know? And the fact that this dramatic license to confine them to this mansion. Like, for the most part, this movie takes place almost entirely in the mansion.

• 13:23Speaker 08

  It's like a bottle episode, sort of, yeah.

• 13:25Aisha Harris?

  It's basically a bottle episode. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 13:27Speaker 08

  Also, just to Linda's point about the woo-iness of Steve Carell's character, like, Steve Carell's also sort of running up against something.

• 13:33Aisha Harris?

  Right.

• 13:34Speaker 08

  That he can't, sort of like Wilhelm Zavado, just like his money and his wealth. A big part of his motivation in this movie is like, all right, I can just warp reality around me all the time because I'm so rich and have so much power, but I can't do it in this case. And someone is telling him something that he can't do anything about, and he's like, you're a stupid person, right?

• 13:50Aisha Harris?

  Yes, yes.

• 13:51Speaker 10

  You're looking at certainly five, probably 10, maybe 15 years before. You're not a very intelligent person, are you, Dr. Phipps?

• 14:00Aisha Harris?

  I do get a little bit of consolation out of watching characters like this, like watching Randall, who thinks like he's invincible and that he can work around his mortality. I get pleasure out of saying like, well, they seem very miserable. Like, at least I have that.

• 14:16Speaker 08

  At least they seem deeply unhappy.

• 14:18Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. Now, let's get into like the sort of third act twist here. Yes, we are gonna get into spoilers for the last part of the movie, so you have been warned. The basic gist of this is that Jeff, played by Ramy Youssef, and Venice, played by Cory Michael Smith, they are the biggest frenemies. They are the sort of, the most at each other's throats, shall we say. Jeff suggests to Randall, the Steve Carell character, like, that he needs to like, get him off the board of his company because he's ruining everything. And then Randall is not happy about that because Randall has already asked Venice, like, hey, this like, AI thing, I want you to work on something to make me, make it so that like, I could live forever, you know?

• 15:03Linda Holmes?

  Make me immortal.

• 15:05Aisha Harris?

  Which turns into Randall, Venice, and Super all conspiring to try and kill Jeff.

• 15:12Linda Holmes?

  And at first, when Randall first suggests killing Jeff, because as Ayesha said, like, you know, Jeff is threatening to interfere with Randall's plans for immortality. So when he first starts to suggest killing Jeff, he's like, I'm not literally saying we should kill Jeff, but he clearly is from the beginning. And I very much like that whole, I think that whole exchange is really funny.

• 15:34Speaker 10

  That's just a galaxy brain move is to kill Jeff. So we should work back from there and find a solution that has the same outcome as killing Jeff, that obviously doesn't involve the killing of Jeff.

• 15:49Speaker 08

  I'm not saying we should kill him. I'm saying I have no priors about what the other options might be.

• 15:55Linda Holmes?

  Oh, my God. One of the things I love about this film is the way that it's written so that it includes the way these guys talk where they don't say anything, but they're constantly talking.

• 16:08Linda Holmes?

  Yes. Is very, very funny. And you do get, I think in this section, you get one of the things I appreciate about this, which is Steve Carell has done a lot of things in the last several years, some of which I've enjoyed really a lot that are not Michael Scott. However, in this movie, from time to time, you get, what if Michael Scott had billions of dollars? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

• 16:33Speaker 16

  I just feel like the universe is like taking, uh, it's like taking a grip and it's easing me apart. Like my torso is being levered apart with tremendous force and like the emptiness of the galaxies is just like rushing in.

• 16:45Speaker 10

  Hmm. Not good.

• 16:50Linda Holmes?

  When Randall says, not good, that is Michael Scott through and through. And as they move into this, we should kill Jeff. There's a part where they talk about if Jeff can defend himself with a razor, like with a shaving razor, that's very Michael Scott. I really loved all the performances in this film equally, pretty much, which I really was surprised by. I'm not always a Jason Schwartzman guy, but I thought he was great in this. I thought he was really funny and Supes is such a pitiful, you know, he's kind of the punching bag because he's only worth 500 million.

• 17:27Aisha Harris?

  Well, I loved that reveal that the reason they call him Supes or Super is because he is the quote unquote poorest of them all and they compare him to a soup kitchen. And I'm just like, oh, my goodness. Yes, that is a great joke. That is a great joke with a payoff.

• 17:43Linda Holmes?

  The whole time, he's kind of wanting to be like a cool guy who's in these conversations. And once they decide to kill Jeff, he's kind of constantly doing like the, should we really kill Jeff? Can we step back from killing Jeff? Because it's his house. And so he's partly worried about killing Jeff in his house, as he should be. And like the other, and there's a moment where they're gonna kill Jeff and they don't. That's very funny.

• 18:07Aisha Harris?

  There's a couple moments where they try.

• 18:10Linda Holmes?

  They kind of wind up hanging Supes out to try a little bit. And it's really, like, I thought it was really funny. I get that in some ways it is preposterous. And I would also have watched a version of this movie where you're much more staying tethered to reality while they talk about what they're gonna do about this meltdown of the world. But I was also fine with this ultimately very slapsticky. Ultimately, there's a squeegee. I thought it was very funny and it delighted me.

• 18:37Speaker 08

  Absolutely. These are not people get their hands dirty at all, right?

• 18:40Linda Holmes?

  Right.

• 18:41Speaker 08

  Even though they're like very cavalier about the sort of chaos that there's going in the world.

• 18:45Aisha Harris?

  And taking over a country. They're like, who's gonna get this country?

• 18:48Speaker 08

  Let's just cool it out a little bit. Let's just cool it out.

• 18:50Aisha Harris?

  Let's cool it out.

• 18:50Linda Holmes?

  Well, maybe, you know.

• 18:51Aisha Harris?

  How about a pre pardon?

• 18:54Linda Holmes?

  They all sound like Jesse Armstrong dialogue, but they all sound different.

• 18:58Speaker 08

  They all sound like themselves.

• 18:59Linda Holmes?

  Yeah. And I feel like I could go through and identify a lot of lines and say, well, this would only be this guy versus this guy.

• 19:05Speaker 08

  There's that moment in which they're all watching the chaos that Venice's app has unleashed into the world, like on their phones. It's like, oh, these people are sort of enslaved to the same technology, right? They're just all sort of like, it's on the nose, but that's fine, right? It's like, one of the critiques of like concentrated wealth is always that it's inherently anti-democratic. Like, there's no amount of public support or public opposition to anything that really matters. If like a bunch of people can say, like, I don't want that. Or I do, you know, I want the opposite of that. And these dudes very much live in that space where like, oh, well, my will is, I can get, we can get that to happen. Like, the part when they're planning a coup of a Latin American country from his theater is like, oh, this is. Unhinged, but also, is it that implausible? I truly don't know.

• 19:46Aisha Harris?

  No, it is not. No, it is not.

• 19:49Linda Holmes?

  You find yourself having that feeling, right? Like, like, how far are we from how some of this would go? And I think fortunately, none of these guys map perfectly onto existing tech people. I don't think that's the game. I don't think it's this guy is this guy and this guy is this guy. And that gives them, I think, more freedom to kind of play with what these guys talk about doing.

• 20:12Aisha Harris?

  Well, let's be real, it's also because so many of those real life guys are kind of the same person.

• 20:16Linda Holmes?

  Well, yeah.

• 20:17Aisha Harris?

  They all have, they have, they all have a lot of overlapping qualities that could not.

• 20:21Linda Holmes?

  They have overlapping qualities, but I think it's like, it's smart that you don't look at it and be like, okay, so this is the Musk, this is the Zuckerberg, this is the whatever.

• 20:30Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, it sounds like I've turned, I've turned my life around and come around to Mountain Head. We want to know what you think about Mountain Head. Find us on Facebook at facebook.com slash PCHH and on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com slash NPR Pop Culture. We'll have a link to that in our episode description. That brings us to the end of our show. Jean Demby, Linda Holmes, thanks so much for being here. This was such a fun weekend hang in the mountains.

• 21:00Speaker 08

  I'm glad they got to do this, thank you.

• 21:01Linda Holmes?

  I hope that you both get your bee nut.

• 21:05Speaker 08

  Don't curse me with that.

• 21:06Aisha Harris?

  Bee nuts for all of us.

• 21:10Aisha Harris?

  Ooh, just a reminder that signing up for Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus is a great way to support our show and public radio, and you get to listen to all of our episodes sponsor free. That's almost like having a bee nut. Yeah. So please, go find out more at plus.npr.org/happyhour or visit the link in our show notes. This episode was produced by Liz Metzger and Mike Katsev and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, Kamin provides our theme music. Thanks so much for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Aisha Harris. We'll see you all next time.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.