Episode Details

BACKKLASH™ Worldwide returning guest and Christmas Secretary Hagalaz joins Poolhouse for an incendiary blast of motherfucking TRVKE.

Hagalaz returns to talk about the cult she recently started, her new occasional podcast series Hyacinth House, and to lead Poolhouse through a tarot reading on the theme of redemption before the two descend into a sprawling discussion of Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 cult masterpiece Possession.

Using the film as a lens, Hagalaz and Poolhouse unpack the contemporary gender war: the increasingly distorted relationship between men and women, the tension between traditionalist expectations and progressive feminism, motherhood and paternal responsibility, surveillance, identity, domestic obligation, and the suffocating gap between who we are and the roles we are expected to perform.

From there, the conversation turns to the Lindsay Clancy case and the way competing ideological camps consume real human catastrophe as evidence for pre-existing narratives about women, men, motherhood, mental illness, family, and social decline. What happens when concern for children becomes another weapon in an endless culture war? And what happens when the people supposedly defending human beings become more invested in winning the argument than understanding them?

Finally, Possession opens onto something larger and considerably darker: an era in which technological life itself increasingly feels supernatural. Algorithms feed anxiety back to us, political and gender archetypes replace actual people, private fears become mass-media spectacles, and reality arrives already processed through an invisible machinery of signs, incentives, surveillance, and polarization.

REPODEMPTION: Poolhouse and Hagalaz on possession, redemption, gender war, mass informatics, and the monster growing behind the algorithm.

Hagalaz is on X.

Poolhouse is online.