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SPEAKER_12: Hey, it's Latif. When many of us were younger, TV and movies were full of moments where some hapless character would be walking along in some new exotic place. They'd take a wrong step and then they'd just start to slowly get slurped down into the earth. Quicksand was in so many movies. And it makes total sense why, right? Like the sucking, sinking, inevitable drawn outness of it. That's just universally terrifying, right?
SPEAKER_12: Turns out, nope. In 2013, journalist Dan Engber pulled our editor Soren Wheeler into his obsession with quicksand and its surprisingly deep resonances through history. What it all reveals is that what we fear and how we articulate those fears are a lot more shifty and sandy than you might think. So now for no other reason than that we wanted to, we're playing that episode for you again. Quicksand! Enjoy. Wait, you're listening. You're listening to Radio Lab. From WNYC. Rewind.
SPEAKER_11: Hey, I'm Chad Abumrad.
SPEAKER_08: I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radio Lab. We do have an interesting podcast for you. We do indeed. Soren Wheeler is standing in front of the camera. He's going to be doing a little bit of a
SPEAKER_07: story of an obsession that swallowed reporter Dan Engber pretty much whole.
SPEAKER_11: Of all the things to catch your attention, how did this happen to pop into your head?
SPEAKER_13: It happened to pop into my head because I was talking to a friend of mine who's an elementary school teacher and we were discussing quicksand as one does. Oh, of course. This elementary school teacher and I. And she just said, you know, the kids in my class just don't even, they don't, they've never heard of quicksand. Like second graders, third graders, like what?
SPEAKER_02: Nine year olds? Nine year olds? Well, that's like fourth graders. That's prime time for quicksand.
SPEAKER_13: Right. When I was nine, quicksand was a major part of my life. We would, you know, pour water in the corner of the sandbox and say, oh, it's quicksand. But your teacher friend's students didn't. Right. But so I went to her, I visited her class and I discovered that she was wrong. Almost all of them had heard of quicksand, but she was right in so far as quicksand was not important to them. In fact, they thought it wasn't scary at all. And I was like, well, what are you afraid of? And they said, you know, zombies, the alien in Pacific Rim, ghosts.
SPEAKER_08: When I was actually lost writing, being attacked by a dinosaur. That would be totally more scary.
SPEAKER_02: So we actually went and talked to some third graders. And while some of them said, well, I guess it's sort of scary, but most of them weren't
SPEAKER_02: scared of it at all.
SPEAKER_08: I don't think so. I usually don't think about it.
SPEAKER_13: They thought it was something that maybe their parents had been afraid of. Dad told me that when he was little, his friends always said like, look out, that could be quicksand.
SPEAKER_13: Do you ever say that to you? They would say people used to be scared of that, but it's not scary anymore. So that got me to thinking, what happened? Why is quicksand not scary the way it used to be?
SPEAKER_02: And with that simple question, Dan got sucked into a world he never even knew existed.
SPEAKER_13: So the next step was going to the internet. And within a minute, I discovered the quicksand fetish community. The quicksand fetish?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Like fetish fetish, like sex fetish? Yes.
SPEAKER_13: Oh. So among the quicksand fetishists, there are so-called sinkers. These are people who seek out quicksand in nature and want to jump in.
SPEAKER_11: With another person and kiss or by themselves with no clothes on? Or where's the sex part?
SPEAKER_13: Some of them by themselves with no clothes on. Some smaller group with another person that they can convince their partner to come with them.
SPEAKER_02: But they always have a rope with them, I hope.
SPEAKER_13: Oh, yeah. Oh, if you go on to the sinker's message boards, there's a Google map which has sinking spots all over the world. And each one is rated for thickness, depth, privacy, available parking nearby. I mean, it's a really, it's like a very thought through and wonderfully collaborative community. So there's sinkers in one hand and then there are the watchers. They just want to see people or animals sinking into quicksand. So they'll watch movies and just find the quicksand sequence in the movie.
SPEAKER_02: And here's where Dan sunk even deeper. Because he discovered that one of these watchers... This guy, Crypto... Had, in the course of his fetishistic quicksand watching... Collated this, you know, this list of well over a thousand quicksand scenes in film and
SPEAKER_13: television.
SPEAKER_05: Quicksand? Quicksand? Is this part of the country? No way. That's a nice...
SPEAKER_02: There were scenes going all the way back to the birth of filmmaking.
SPEAKER_13: I mean, this is the greatest impetus for scientific research. If you have like a fetishistic interest in the data. And Dan thought maybe this data can give us a clue about how the way we think about quicksand
SPEAKER_02: has changed. So I went through and I pulled out every feature film from the list.
SPEAKER_13: And then with information from the MPAA, I figured out how many movies were being released every decade. And then I sort of computed a... Like what percent of movies had quicksand in every decade? Going back to the first quicksand movie they have is from 1909. It's a silent film where a woman gets rescued from quicksand by some hooded monks. I'm unable to find this movie, but I'd love to see it. I don't know what it's about. But anyways, I started looking at the number of movies by decade. The beginning of the century, it's like one in a thousand movies. By the 30s, it's up to one in 500. And then in the 40s, one in 200. And then in the 1960s, all of a sudden, it just shoots up. Like one in 35, like almost 3% of Hollywood movies have quicksand. The 1960s are just clearly a moment for quicksand.
SPEAKER_02: Dan says it wasn't just the number of films. The quicksand scenes that showed up in the 60s were serious, dramatic scenes. For example, Lawrence of Arabia, where Peter O'Toole is pushing through the dust storm
SPEAKER_13: to try to save his companion who's being sucked under. That movie won seven Oscars. And then Woman in the Dunes came out. This like artsy Japanese existentialist meditation.
SPEAKER_02: And for about the next 10 years, Dan says, you had all these serious films that featured quicksand. And then it fell off dramatically.
SPEAKER_13: In the 1970s, it's already fallen to something like one out of 75. And then by the 1980s, it's like one out of 130. And then in the 90s, quicksand is mostly gone.
SPEAKER_09: Huh.
SPEAKER_13: And I think also in the 80s, it had migrated into television.
SPEAKER_05: I'm stuck in quicksand.
SPEAKER_04: Boy, are you having one bad day.
SPEAKER_13: Larry and Belky in Perfect Strangers are falling into quicksand. There's quicksand in My Little Pony. There's quicksand in Rainbow Pride. I mean, it's zany quicksand.
SPEAKER_02: Basically, Dan says quicksand had become a joke.
SPEAKER_13: And so and that's the end, I think, when when quicksand is in Saturday cartoons.
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SPEAKER_07: After but her emails became shorthand in 2016 for the media's deep focus on Hillary Clinton's server hygiene at the expense of policy issues is history repeating itself.
SPEAKER_04: You can almost see an equation again, I would say, led by the times in Biden being old with Donald Trump being under dozens of felony indictments.
SPEAKER_07: Listen to On the Media from WNYC. Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. I think I do think that adventure gags probably have a lifespan.
SPEAKER_03: So just for a gut check, Dan and I decided maybe we should run this past
SPEAKER_02: somebody who knows the business. I'm Carlton Cuse and I'm a television writer and producer.
SPEAKER_03: And Carlton was actually the showrunner for the TV show Lost.
SPEAKER_02: And that's a show that by rights should have tons of quicksand.
SPEAKER_13: I mean, they should be in quicksand all the time. They're stranded on a tropical island. It's an adventure show. But according to Carlton, whenever one of the writers would say, you know,
SPEAKER_03: OK, so Kate goes running down a path and then all of a sudden she falls into a pit of quicksand. The rest of them would be like, um, um, I don't know if we can really pull that off. So what is that?
SPEAKER_02: Like, what is it that would make that not, I don't know.
SPEAKER_03: You know, I just think a lot of people would sort of be rolling their eyes and not, and not buying it. I know it sounds, it sounds kind of crazy because you know, here you are making sort of a crazy show with smoke monsters and polar bears and time travel. And for someone to say, no, no, no, but we don't believe quicksand. I know it's, um, but ultimately you just sort of trust your gut. And it's just right now where quicksand is just not sort of, I think the right metaphor for how we're all feeling. But in the sixties it was.
SPEAKER_11: Has someone speculated as to the reason why the sixties? Oh, I've, I've speculated, uh, at great wave.
SPEAKER_13: I mean, it's, it's a fascinating moment because it's not just in movies.
SPEAKER_04: I believe that this nation should commit itself.
SPEAKER_13: So we're planning the moon mission in the early sixties. Landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. And this Cornell astronomer named Thomas Gold says, what if when the Apollo Lander descends to the surface of the moon, it just sinks into a lunar quicksand. I remember this. I remember Tom gold saying that too. Yeah. So right at this golden moment of quicksand, people are discussing real life quicksand on the frontier of that era.
SPEAKER_13: And then 1963 Martin Luther King makes his, I have a dream speech.
SPEAKER_05: The left our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice.
SPEAKER_13: And he says, now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice.
SPEAKER_05: And then I came here to speak to you about Vietnam. There was Vietnam.
SPEAKER_05: I do not have to tell you that our people are profoundly concerned about that struggle. And we now think of Vietnam as having been a quagmire.
SPEAKER_13: That's the rhetoric that's used now. But the debate in the sixties between Daniel Ellsberg and Arthur Schlesinger, uh, they use quicksand and quagmire interchangeably. They just, the Ellsberg will switch off in one essay. He'll call it a quicksand and then a quagmire. But the first use of that idea was to describe it as a quicksand. And then it, it kind of migrates from being a quicksand to quagmire over the course of the late sixties and early seventies. And now, I mean, more evidence now we call it a quagmire. We forgot that Vietnam was a quicksand before it was a quagmire. So on all of these levels, quicksand is just, you know, it's part of these key moments of this 1960s. Wow. So the question that, you know, that was just, I was obsessed with for a long time was why did America fall into quicksand in the 1960s? I mean, did it come out of the movies and suddenly everyone's talking about it or was everyone talking about it? And so maybe everybody saw Lawrence of Arabia and they all went back to their jobs,
SPEAKER_11: somewhere on rocket ship jobs and somewhere on war for your jobs. And they all just carried Peter O'Toole in their heads. It's possible, I suppose.
SPEAKER_13: That's possible. Who knows? I, my sense is that it, it's had to do with just sort of a generalized anxiety about going someplace radically new. Anxiety about, you know, the hubris of traveling to the moon, anxiety about social upheaval, anxiety about the foreign entanglement of Vietnam and the state of geopolitics.
SPEAKER_02: But why, why would that, those anxieties manifest themselves in terms of like quicksand? Why is it? I think it's this idea that you're going to get sucked in, you're going to go too far.
SPEAKER_13: You're going to get stuck in whatever new world you've, you've ventured into. And right now there isn't that anxiety of exploration anymore. I mean, quicksand in Shakespeare's time was always off the coasts of new continents. It had to do with the age of exploration. And then it became, you know, desert quicksand and jungle quicksand during colonial era. And I just think the world is... And then it became the moon. Yeah. And then it became the moon. And... Well, look at all the real estate that's beyond the moon.
SPEAKER_11: Come on. I mean, you got like our solar system, you could have the quicksand of Jupiter. Yes, absolutely.
SPEAKER_13: I think if we're going to land humans on some... Black holes.
SPEAKER_11: Isn't black, aren't black holes? A kind of quicksand? Yeah.
SPEAKER_13: This is my guarantee. If we're about to land humans on some planet, you know, beyond the moon, these thoughts of quicksand would re-emerge. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_03: This is Carlton Cuse again. And now we're going to see this whole new chapter of Star Wars. And clearly... It just so happens that the director, J.J. Abrams, is working on a whole new Star Wars movie.
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
SPEAKER_03: And I think in the context of some strange new world, I think the audience would totally buy quicksand there.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, that's what I'm hoping for.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. So I'll shoot J.J. an email and just say quicksand and just leave it at that. See what happens.
SPEAKER_02: Just a quick note, since we did this story, the new Star Wars films have come out. And in fact, in one scene, an entire spaceship, a TIE fighter to be precise, sinks into the sand on a planet called Jakku, where apparently there's a whole region called the Sinking Fields.
SPEAKER_00: Nima outpost is that way. Stay off Kelvin Ridge. Keep away from the Sinking Fields in the north. You'll drown in the sand.
SPEAKER_01: So there you go.
SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Saren. Thanks, Saren. Yeah, no problem. Don't follow me.
SPEAKER_00: Town is that way. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler.
SPEAKER_01: Lulu Miller and Laptif Nasser are our co-hosts. Suzy Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Blum, Bekob Ressler, Rachel Cusick, Ekedi Foster-Keys, W. Harry Fortunat, David Gabel, María Pascu-Tieres, Sindhu Nyanasanbandham, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khari, Ana Rasquette-Paz, Sarah Sandback, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Andrew Vinales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Annalee Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.
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