Vector
A tick carries bacteria from a deer into a human brain. A virus carries chronic stress into a rat's brain. A sentence carries a lie from a landowner into a family, and keeps it there for three generations. Sixty minutes, one take, filmed in a car in Texas.
1:00:13 · single take · captions available
- 0:00Cold open — a war about what America is
- 0:38The Oklahoma sharecropper
- 2:34What a myoclonic spasm looks like
- 3:54Vector
- 5:06The Pledge
- 10:49Galileo
- 12:54The pilot
- 13:18Latent space
- 16:29Dr. Nemeroff and the rats
- 22:34Sixteen years of this
- 23:31Klonopin
- 26:58“She meant well”
- 28:12Hardware, software, and the womb
- 30:41The U-curve
- 32:37What it looks like in a president
- 35:37The turn
- 37:12Hawaii
- 43:00Androgen insensitivity
- 44:30Eighty dollars
- 45:18The skillet shot
- 46:53The wig
- 47:24The latent space of the brain
- 50:40Telling the family
- 55:21The Inquisition again
- 56:45The sixties
- 57:08The Pledge, again
- 58:30The balance
- 59:43The pendulum
“It's like a what's called a vector. It goes from one thing to another thing.”
3:54
“I'm trying to live and boost my dopamine, like my sharecropper great-grandfather. You do what you got to do to survive. A skillet shot.”
45:18
“It's latent in the sense that it's not non-existent. It's there, but it's not activated.”
47:24
“I wondered if I would have stood with my black brothers and sisters when they were being discriminated against in the 60s. And now, at least by standing up, I know.”
56:45
“The white landowners said to my great-grandfather, ‘at least you're not black’ — to separate them so that they couldn't fight together against the wealthy white landowner.”
57:47
The involuntary movements in this film are myoclonic spasms, a consequence of a Lyme infection that reached the brain. They have not been edited out. At 2:34 one interrupts him and he explains what it was. At 22:34 he stops and says: imagine this every day for sixteen years.