01x00 - Pilot

[bunniefuu]

[Meow]

I have the truth!

I have the truth to tell all of you!

Heed this warning!

You will not be on this earth for very much longer!

These are the end of days!

How did it go today?

[sigh]

Win any new followers?

No, I'm afraid not, God. I'm sorry.

You told them the news, right?

That the world's ending in four days.

Four days!

Four days, people, and life as we know it will cease to exist!

Repent! [Grunt]

These are the end of days, man.

How do you feel about that, huh?

Yes, I told them.

Did you make the sign?

The earth will be laid bare!

World ends!

Fin de los días, people.

That's what I'm talking about.

Sorry to ruin your day, but...

Yes, I made the sign.

Well, but that thing I came up with, where you swing your arms around really fast?

Aah! The end is coming! The end is coming! Yes!

Yeah, I tried that a lot.

Huh.

You know, I actually just had a thought, God.

What if I wore something more socially acceptable, like a shirt...

I have a very strict dress code for my prophets.

It's helmet, Speedo.

End of story.

I know, and I would never second-guess you.

I just think that people may have a better reaction if I wore a suit.

You have a good point, yes.

Good! I was hoping that you might see...

Construct a gown made of aluminum foil and gird yourself with it.

I just really don't think that that's going to work.

Of course it's going to work.

If you saw a guy dressed entirely in aluminum foil, you wouldn't ignore him, right? No.

You would sit right down and see what he had to say.

Fine.

I'm sorry!

Well, that didn't go as well as I'd expected.

Humiliating.

Why don't we try down at the intersection?

I bet you'd have more luck down there.

Okay.

I think you should make your sign bigger.

You know?

And one last thing.

What?

Keep your head up.

Thanks, God.

Hi, Marina Abramovic. Nice to see you here.

You actually pronounced my name pretty well.

I've been working on it.

People are so confused with my name.

Ariel Levy (narrating): Marina Abramovic is the world's most famous performance artist.

Starting in the 1970s, her hypnotic and often disturbing work has explored Marina's own physical and mental limits and blurred the boundaries between performer and audience.

In 2010, she reached a milestone: her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York entitled "The Artist is Present."

Walk! Walk, please! Walk!

Man: Walk, walk.

The exhibition debuted a piece in which Marina remained seated silently for seven hours a day for over two months, joined by one visitor at a time.

The show was a sensation, with the museum attracting 750,000 people during its run.

Now in her new show "Generator," the artist is not necessarily present.

Let's go for it.

Marina, who for so long has made herself the center of attention, cannot be seen or heard by the people who experience the exhibition.

Marina: This kind of experience would be no way possible ten years ago because public was not ready, but now they're so tired of everything.

We're tired from electronics and tired from selfies and tired from the telephones and computers, so when you take all these things out and you put them into empty space and you blindfold them and put the headphones on the ears, they... they actually find themselves with themselves.

But even if I'm not present, people have a feeling that I'm there, which is strange.

Which I assume... I mean, correct me if I'm wrong... was part of what you were playing with, right?

I mean, we go from from the huge MoMA show "The Artist is Present," where part of what people are, you know, coming in droves to experience is they know they're going to have an encounter with you.

And now you're present in spirit but not in physicality. I mean, is that part of what you're working with?

You know, every performance bring to new step of development, so "Artist is Present" was really one-to-one communication, but it's not anymore the situation when the public is in the front of the artist and seeing him performing.

You know, this whole thing about how do I deal with celebrity and I'm Marina Abramovic and if you... if I'm not looking at you and not touching you, then you don't experience.

It's bullshit. Is you have to get experience.

Nobody ever change from experience with somebody else.

You have to make the journey.

[gasp]

We are so afraid with all this unknown territory, and here you're actually free to do.

It's like a blind man.

You have to feel energy everywhere, and that's something that you have to develop.

With eyes closed, you see more.

This is the main thing.

With eyes closed, you see more.

It's an interesting thing to me that so much of your work lately has been about negotiating a peaceful, quiet state of being.

And then there's the business of the mortification of the flesh and pain.

[moaning]

Marina: Now it's 40 years of career.

Looking back, in the beginning, I really wanted to know where the limits of the physical body, so in my first part of my life, I want to push physical borders so the audience can look at that, how I'm going through that.

Now actually I'm losing fear of the pain and how I liberate myself through this experience so I become the mirror.

If I can do to myself this, they can do maybe their life with their own pain.

[grunting]

If the pain is like a door of consciousness, when you really control the pain, you can control the body, and you can control the mind.

In the '90s, you said, "If you're not a passionate... "

"If you're not passionate in life, you cannot be passionate in art. Making love is an extremely important part of my life."

Do you have to have a good sex life to be a good artist?

[laughing] I never said exactly...

Oh, I'm sorry. Did I misinterpret it?

No, no, no, no, no. I said something else.

I think the sexual energy is incredibly important.

This is primordial energy.

[chanting in Balkan language]

And I made a really interesting piece that I loved because not many people know here because sex is such a taboo in this country, and it's called "Balkan Erotic Epic."

[chanting continues]

I went to my old country Yugoslavia, and I start looking into these old rituals, and then I actually take these rituals, and I made them as a film with real people.

So one of the rituals come from the 14th century, and this... the ritual is like this: if the rain falls in the villages, so many of this rain that it would be completely flooded and the people not anything to eat for the... in next season.

The one ritual that all the women of the village run to the fields and lift their skirts, show their vag*na to scare the gods to stop the rain.

Excuse me. This was not bad.

That was my favorite piece in the MoMA show was the film of those vaginas flying in the rain... was punishing the gods for raining?

Yeah, but can you imagine the power of the vag*na to punish the god?

I mean, that's an incredible thing.

That's quite a vag*na, Marina.

That's the... that's the whole idea, and I love that you have the power, you know, that energy.

You know, I've heard you say that the reason there are so many more great men artists than women artists throughout history is that women aren't willing to make the same sacrifices.

That's something you think, right?

That's totally true.

Okay.

But you also said that what has enabled men is that there's always, you know, there's some man artist working at 4 in the morning, and he has his girlfriend come and give him hot soup in the middle of the night in his studio, right?

And which woman great artist gets the hot soup?

Nobody know that women do not get the great hot soup.

Is complete disaster. No hot soup.

But don't you think that that sort of recognition of a structural inequality like that, that's feminism?

You see, maybe you're right, but I never think that way.

I'm much more interested to think in terms of what is my purpose on this planet, that I really want to be an artist, that I'm doing what I'm doing, and... and now is kind of to elevate the consciousness of human beings, to change consciousness.

I think that we can only change this world if we change consciousness.

Hi.

Well, where I was?

On another planet.

I'm interested in how I can do, what I can do, my personal level in my lifetime.

[frog croaking]

[trilling]

That's a frog.

So that [trilling], that's one of the tree frogs.

That's the gray tree frog.

[trilling]

That one. [Trilling]

See something moving on the bottom?

That's not fish. It's definitely tadpoles.

[whistling]

[animal imitates whistle]

It's funny, the word herpetology, from the Greek.

It means the study of things that live under things.

Huh.

Oh.

That's a toad.

This is the same one that we used to catch in my grandmother's yard.

[laughing]

I mean, the community still is, like most in South Carolina, segregated, so this whole area was black.

Uh, the first white person I ever met was when I went to middle school because I went to a different area for middle school.

So you can go Juniper Street and then make a left on Benedict.

That's the street that goes by my house.

God, I haven't been here in probably ten years.

Man: You want to get out?

I have no idea.

I don't know who lives here.

People still sh**t at you in South Carolina, you know, so... [laughing]

Mm-hmm.

This is, uh, my old neighborhood.

I think that house just across the street, uh, we moved there when I was maybe 3 years old, and then, when I was in fourth grade, we moved to this house.

Uh, but it was a lot different back then.

We couldn't stand where we're standing back then.

This was all big swamp and wetland, and when it rained, the ditches would overflow, and there'd be water flowing through our yard through the neighborhood.

We had snakes and turtles and, you know, you name it.

When I was in middle school, I tried to make the basketball team because the only black people I knew who went to college, you had to have an athletics scholarship, so I thought I had to learn how to play a sport.

Little did you know.

Yeah. Then I read about how temperature controls sex in turtles, and so we collected turtles, actually my father and I, because you'd see them crossing the road, so my father would bring turtles home, or I would collect turtles out of the ditch that ran here, and then we made this big cement pond and fenced it in, and the idea was to raise these turtles and get turtle eggs and apply different temperatures and look at the sex ratio, and that was right there in that corner.

H-Hey!

[laughing]

Listen, I'll call you back.

Boy, how are you?

How are you? I'm good. I'm good.

Oh, Tyrone, I'm so proud of you!

All those times you were in the ditch, we would be playing basketball... come on... and he would be in the ditch, and when it rained, the snakes would come out through the ditch.

He would pick them up, and we're like "Oh, Tyrone, no!"

And he's like "But just look at... "

Frogs, you name it.

If it crawled or if it was in water, he was playing with it.

[car horn honks]

Come on. She going to die when she see you.

Tyrone's home!

Tyrone, I'm not getting on TV because I don't have no makeup on.

Look at me.

Tyrone, Tyrone.

This was my grandmother's old house.

Where?

She was still...

Right there.

Just here?

Yeah. That's the driveway right there.

Yeah.

Oh, my Lord.

My family are all Baileys, so they were brought here as slaves.

They were owned by a man named Bailey.

My grandmother was born here.

She was still living here when she d*ed.

Not... you know, it wasn't like this when she d*ed, but...

She was a schoolteacher, so she bought me all the school books, so by the time I was in second or third grade, I'd been through all the reading books and all the math books.

I'd done all that with my grandmother.

Woman: Our house was like a zoo.

[Tyrone laughing]

In the living room we had eight aquariums: salt water, fresh water.

In one bedroom we had a legless lizard on the heat rock.

The other bedroom, we had two corn snakes, a boa constrictor. What else?

[laughter]

This is a picture of Tyrone with his two brothers.

That's before a piano recital.

This is first grade, second grade, third, fourth, fifth, sixth...

Tyrone: I'll never forget my very first day at Harvard.

They were having a little welcoming party and stuff, and I was Mr. "I'm so happy to be here," you know, going around and meeting everybody, and I remember I reached out my hand to this guy, and he had been wait listed.

He wasn't a student of Harvard.

He put his hand down, and he said,

"It's because of Affirmative Action and people like you that I'm wait listed."

He finished top of his class, you know, and, uh... it made me very proud from where I came from.

We didn't have indoor plumbing.

We didn't have, like, electric lights until... [tongue clicks]...

I guess I was about 9 years old.

And by the time I was 12, uh, my aunt took me... my mother's baby sister... and, um, my life began to change.

I married a educated woman here.

[laughing]

She taught me to speak French.

[laughing]

Oh... Oh, really?

Don't go there.

Son, I'm not going there. I'm not...

[laughter]

I like birds, and I like mammals.

I like reptiles.

But what fascinated me about frogs was their development.

I had a little brother, but he was inside my mom.

I knew he was developing.

I knew birds. I knew something was going on behind those eggshells, but frogs, you can see everything that's happening.

And it turns out now, as I've discovered as an adult, that many of the chemicals that we make and put into the environment interfere with these processes which have evolved over millions and millions and millions of years.

I had never heard of atrazine.

Now you Google atrazine, you get Tyrone.

You Google Tyrone, you get atrazine.

We're joined at the carbon bond.

It's a weed k*ller that's mostly used on corn, which is the number 1 crop in the U.S.

At the time, it was the number 1 selling pesticide in the world.

What atrazine does in frogs, what we discovered, is that it really screws up males, that the male sex organs don't develop properly.

In their own plant in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, they have a prostate cancer rate that's 8.4 times higher, and that's compared to people who work in the same plant but didn't work bagging the atrazine.

They can measure it in the clouds, and it can come down a thousand kilometers from where it was applied.

That's one of the main reasons that the European Union came together and banned atrazine because France banned it.

They were still using it in Germany.

It was coming down in the rain water.

The EPA is no longer saying atrazine doesn't do anything.

The EPA understands clearly what atrazine does.

They're saying it's not worth it.

We have to keep it on the market because of the economy.

I'm off. Thank you for everything.

All right.

Kathy and I met at Harvard: February 21, 1987.

I graduated on June 8 in 1989, and we were married two days later.

And then we moved here in September of '89.

Kathy: Tyrone has asked to be on a scientific panel to review the evidence about atrazine.

When he discovered these results and reported it to them, they asked him to do some additional work to make sure that, you know, these things were really accurate.

So he did some additional work, and then they wanted him to do more and more and more, and this is where, uh, Syngenta said, um, you know, basically, "We could fund you for a really long time if you'll just keep repeating this."

It could have been very easy just to take all the money they were offering and be set for life. It would have been, like, an endowment for life for him for research.

Tyrone: I performed the experiment in good faith like I would any experiment.

It was done objective. It was done blind so you didn't know which animals were being treated and which were the controls, the placebo.

And I honestly thought that when they saw the atrazine have these adverse effects on frogs, then they would...

I don't know why I thought they would pull the product or look at a new formula or...

Certainly not deny or try to manipulate the science the way that they did.

That certainly wasn't something that I expected at all.

Recently there was a class action suit accusing Syngenta of concealing the dangerous nature of atrazine.

Syngenta eventually settled.

They decided to pay $105 million, um, to pay for the costs of filtering atrazine, but they denied any wrongdoing.

The most powerful thing the class action suit did in some way was force Syngenta to open up its internal records.

They had drafted a list of four goals, and the first goal was to discredit Hayes, to make sure that there were systematic rebuttals of all of Tyrone's appearances, investigating his wife, investigating his funding.

It was clear through those notes that they saw him as a thr*at and wanted to kind of dispose of him.

"For example, we could take Dr. Hayes' calendar of speaking engagements and share it with Dave Flackme and Danelle Farmer, who can then start reaching out to the potential audiences. What's motivating Hayes? Basic questions."

And they claim they weren't following me around.

[laughing]

"School history. Investigate wife. Set a trap." That's my favorite.

Rachel: I find it interesting that they were so perplexed by what motivates him.

In these documents is the sense that Hayes must be funded by someone, that there must be some kind of financial basis for this quest of his.

They couldn't understand or get... wrap their heads around the fact that he was motivated by his own idealism and that he...

Money was just not a part of that picture for him.

Tyrone: Salinas River flows south to north, and in the south it's uncontaminated.

As you get north, there's a lot of habitat degradation.

The river dries up because the water's being drawn off agriculture.

Oh, this dirt's hot, though.

Oh, there's big crayfish in there. Look at that.

Woman: There's a metamorph...

We're looking at raccoon prints.

Keep the metamorph.

85% of the country's lettuce comes from here.

So downstream of the river, the water's mostly agricultural runoff.

Frogs have moved down there.

They really have impaired reproduction and impaired immune function and higher disease rates and all those kinds of things.

When you come at this time, dusk, and when you look out into the landscape, you can see in your mind's eye what it used to or what it could have used to look like in the past because it's really a beautiful place.

And then you get into the water, and you can smell the pesticides coming off the water.

The types of chemical harm that we're talking about aren't... it's not acute toxicity.

And it's the same thing with people, right?

You can drink atrazine and walk out and be fine, but when you're exposed to it developmentally and when you're exposed to it over time, just like any other estrogenic chemical, then you're increasing your likelihood of getting, for example, breast cancer or prostate cancer early in life.

I used to play with my brothers and siblings while planes were releasing the pesticide, so we used to think, "Oh, it looks like... so pretty, beautiful," and we were wondering why people were wearing suits, and, well, we were just, like, running in the fields trying to catch the planes, and then we find out that, oh, we could be affected somehow.

There is a problem.

The population that works here...

Latin Americans, so they do not speak English... people working in the fields, they work in the fields because they don't get the language, so they're Spanish speaking who sometimes don't even have access to these articles, to the newspaper.

Like, I think, to this point, people do not know about what Tyrone is doing, and they probably don't even know who Syngenta is.

"Salinas was surrounded and penetrated with swamps, with tool-filled ponds, and every pond spawned thousands of frogs. By the evening, the air was so full of their song that it was a kind of roaring silence. It was a veil, a background, and its sudden disappearance, as after a clapping thunder, was a shocking thing."

"It is possible that, if in the night, the frogs' song should have stopped, everyone in Salinas would have awakened feeling that there was a great noise. In their millions, the frogs' songs seemed to have a b*at and a cadence, and perhaps it is the ear's function to do this, just as it is the eye's business to make stars twinkle."

[frogs twittering]

[child singing fanfare]

[man laughing]

* Da-da-da-da *

Woman: You happy your brother's home?

A lot.

Man: Oh, that's nice.

[chatter, cheering]

I love you a lot.

Have fun, and I'll see you later.

All right. Bye.

So I put on my black-white checkered Vans, the exact pair of shoes my older brother wore when he was still a citizen in the world.

And I go out.

I go out into the street with my map of the dead and look for him, for the X he is.

So I can put the scepter back in his hands, take the cloak from my shoulders and put it around his, lift the crown from my head and fit it just above his eyebrows... so I can get down on one knee... on both knees... and lower my face and whisper "My lord, my master, my king."

♪♪ [theme]