The Show for Aug. 4, 2026: Why Phoenix shouldn't exist, the desert toad guru and more

There have been a lot of words spoken and written about whether Phoenix should exist in its current form. An art critic explains how a painter and architect made him think about that question. Plus, the story of the guru who peddled transcendence through psychedelic Sonoran Desert toads.

Transcript

MARK BRODIE: Hi, I’m Mark Brodie, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday, we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here’s today’s episode.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, and welcome to The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, Katie Hobbs won’t debate Andy Biggs in the governor’s race, but what serves the voters?

LAUREN GILGER: And how a pair of artists made a critic rethink his hometown.

MARK BRODIE: But first, reporting from The New York Times has found the death rate from drug overdoses in Arizona has overtaken that of West Virginia for the first time in a few decades. The paper found Arizona and New Mexico have the highest rates of drug deaths in the lower 48 states. And a key contributor to that appears to be the heat we experience here this time of year. Joining us now to explain is Rebecca Sunenshine, medical director of the Health Observatory at ASU. Rebecca, good morning.

REBECCA SUNENSHINE: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

MARK BRODIE: Thank you for being here. So, does what the Times found and what the CDC numbers found sort of reflect your experience here and what you’ve seen over the years?

REBECCA SUNENSHINE: Well, I think sort of attributing the increase of the increase in overdose-related deaths directly to the heat might be a bit of an oversimplification. I think what we do see every year in Arizona, and particularly in Maricopa County, is that we see a high number of heat-related deaths that also involve substances. And they are definitely connected. It’s almost always in July. And it’s typically polysubstance abuse, but the vast majority actually involve methamphetamines.

So what we know is that methamphetamines, like other drugs, they sort of decrease your ability to know that you’re hot and to get out of the heat. But in addition, methamphetamines also decrease your ability to know that you’re hungry or thirsty, and so that leads to more dehydration. And most importantly, it increases your metabolism, which actually increases your core body temperature.

So all of those things combined mean that when somebody is using methamphetamines, either alone or in addition to other drugs, they are at much higher risk of dying from heat-related death.

MARK BRODIE: Do we know what percentage of the ... overdose deaths that we see in, let’s say, Maricopa County involve meth as one of the substances that users might have been taking?

REBECCA SUNENSHINE: So ... looking at heat and overdose deaths, when you look at the heat-related deaths, we know that about 50% typically in a year involve substances, and 80% of those involve methamphetamines. Just under half of them include fentanyl — or, excuse me, some type of opioid, which is typically fentanyl. But it’s almost always polysubstance, and methamphetamines is 80% of the time involved in the cause of death. And so we do believe that it’s the methamphetamines that is pushing the heat-related overdose deaths ... to be incredibly high in the summer.

But I do want to mention separately that our overdose deaths took a dip in Arizona in 2024 — it was about 1,651 — and then in 2025, it was up to almost 2,200. And I think that while heat is a factor in that, I think there are other possible reasons why Arizona might be going up while the rest of the country is going down. And I think part of that has to do with the proximity to Mexico, where a lot of the fentanyl comes from.

Unfortunately, what we’re hearing is that the fentanyl has turned to an even more potent, powdered form. And when you’re closer in proximity to Mexico, the likelihood of the drugs being cut is lower. And so we probably are seeing more potent fentanyl exposures here than perhaps in the rest of the country. And I do think that might also be a factor in our increasing overdose numbers.

MARK BRODIE: That would certainly at least appear to indicate why Arizona and New Mexico would be moving in a direction opposite the rest of the country. Are there other factors, do you think, that might be leading to what we’re seeing in Arizona relative to the rest of the country?

REBECCA SUNENSHINE: Well, again, it’s not really known. It’s just what people are thinking about. ... We certainly have gone a long way in getting the distribution of naloxone, which is an opioid reversal agent, out into the community. However, we definitely can do more opioid distribution, particularly our EMS programs — so our fire and ambulance services. When they go to an overdose throughout the state, the Arizona Department of Health Services has done an incredible program to have them actually give naloxone to a person who’s overdosed so that if it happens again, there is naloxone available. But we can always do more of that. And of course, there’s also fentanyl test strips that we might be able to do a better job distributing.

MARK BRODIE: Is it too simplistic to say that if we were to reduce the amount of methamphetamine being used, that we would be able to reduce the number of overdose-related deaths that also involve the heat?

REBECCA SUNENSHINE: I think it is more complicated than that. ... When you talk about heat and substance use, you have to think about homelessness as well. They all intersect. And what we’ve learned from studies that Maricopa County has actually done is that sometimes people don’t actually use substances. And then when they become homeless, they actually begin to use substances because they are homeless. And methamphetamines becomes very attractive because it can keep you awake through the night when your safety is threatened.

So there are so many complicating factors that involve availability of housing, our increasing levels of homelessness, and access to methamphetamines that really make this heat-related death with substances involved problem very complicated. That being said, there is an evidence-based treatment for methamphetamine addiction, and it’s definitely something we could be doing more of in Arizona.

MARK BRODIE: All right. We’ll have to leave it there. That is Rebecca Sunenshine, medical director of the Health Observatory at ASU. Rebecca, thanks so much. I really appreciate it.

REBECCA SUNENSHINE: Thank you very much.

LAUREN GILGER: Congressman Andy Biggs is trying to oust Gov. Katie Hobbs this year and return the governor’s office to the GOP, but he won’t get to face off with her on the debate stage. The Democrat’s camp confirmed last week Hobbs will not debate Biggs. It’s a strategy she’s used to her political advantage in the past, but does it serve the voters? Elvia Díaz is the former editorial page editor of the Arizona Republic. She now writes about her views on her Substack, Notas con Elvia Díaz. And she’s on the line now to tell us more. Good morning, Elvia.

ELVIA DÍAZ: Good morning. Good to be here.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for coming on. So this probably didn’t come as a surprise to you, right? Hobbs refused to debate Kari Lake in 2022. She didn’t debate Marco Lopez, who ran against her in the Democratic primary before that. What’s the political calculation here, Elvia?

ELVIA DÍAZ: Well, you’re correct. This is absolutely a surprise to no one. And the political calculation for her is that she is not going to be thinking on her feet, and she doesn’t need to defend her record in a very unscripted moment, which is a debate. And quite frankly, the part that almost no one is talking about — they’re coming up with all kinds of excuses, especially her political operatives — is the fact that she is not as articulate as the other opponents.

So I’m pretty sure that also has played a role in her. And so it is best for her as a candidate not to do it, and not be in a position where she is not reading a script or she is not just doing soundbites, that she actually has to defend her record and face the political opponents. Did it work for her? Of course. Will it work for her again? Probably. So that’s pretty smart political calculation, but that’s not necessarily good for voters.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. We’ll talk about that in a moment. But the Biggs campaign obviously seized on this immediately, went on the attack. They compared this to former President Joe Biden when he had that disastrous debate performance that basically knocked him out of the last presidential race. I mean, what do you think this does for the Biggs campaign? Gives him a good attack line at least?

ELVIA DÍAZ: It does. And he is using that, as you just mentioned, because he can essentially say, "Well, Gov. Hobbs is a coward. She is unable to face me directly and face you, the voters, without her people telling her what to do." Yes, it’s an attack.

And then the fact that Joe Biden is mentioned, I think everyone can remember that debate that we all thought — we meaning the American people thought — that President Joe Biden at the time was a lot more energetic than he actually was. And that’s how we found out that he was not able to conduct the debate. And that was the end of his political career.

So I’m pretty sure that is playing into Gov. Hobbs’ mind as well in her decision not to debate. But again, having that comparison is not necessarily good for her. Biggs can make that argument that, what is she hiding? What is she afraid of?

LAUREN GILGER: Hobbs’ campaign manager basically said debates are political theater. She said that the debate stage is designed for soundbites. And I mean, honestly, like, that is what you often see, at least in the coverage of debates — less substance, more about kind of getting those jabs in against your opponents. Do debates really serve the public anymore, Elvia?

ELVIA DÍAZ: I do. And let me tell you why. I’m going to reiterate the fact that debates are one of the few unscripted moments in a campaign where voters can actually see candidates think on their feet. That’s what I’m arguing in my column. Even though you are correct that it’s soundbites and they prepare for it, you still have to be thinking, you still have to be delivering.

And the difference between a debate and the campaign events and interviews — Katie Hobbs is saying that she is going to be talking to people face to face and that’s better — well, all that is controlled. Very controlled. Debates are not. And so that’s why it serves a purpose.

And keep in mind that governors regularly face hostile environments, hostile lawmakers, crises, difficult questions, what have you. So voters do deserve to see how candidates perform under pressure. And definitely a debate is under pressure. Again, this may be good for her as a candidate, but is it good for voters? That’s what I’m arguing. A good political calculation for her? Yes. Good for democracy? No.

LAUREN GILGER: Elvia do you think, though, in today’s very divided political landscape, people are so dug in already, especially into their own parties today, that they kind of know who they’re going to vote for anyway? They’re not voting on one specific issue or whatever kind of jab the candidate can get in on a debate. Are we kind of past this in this realm of politics today?

ELVIA DÍAZ: Well, that’s why I’m arguing a debate is a good idea. You are correct. Hardcore Republicans and hardcore Democrats do not need a debate. They already know that they’re going to vote for their candidate. So the people who benefit the most are the independents and the crossover voters.

And keep in mind that independents are a third of Arizona registered voters. So those are the ones that are still evaluating the candidates. They are the ones that are going to be deciding the elections, after all.

And that’s why political pundits are talking about the fact that each candidate are not necessarily talking to all Arizonans because they already know that their base are going to vote for her. They’re only talking to a handful of people — tens of thousands of voters, I believe that’s what political pundits say — because Hobbs won by what, 17,000 last time?

So those are the ones that are going to make the election for each of the candidates. So that’s why I think it’s extremely important for those handful of people that are undecided, that will decide the election.

LAUREN GILGER: Last 30 seconds here for you, Elvia. I mean, does this turn into then a question of the role and the responsibility of the media — of us — of asking those questions, of giving voters that real view if they’re not going to get it via debate?

ELVIA DÍAZ: Yeah, but if we journalists are not getting true access to those candidates, how are we going to do it? Debates are not about really changing thousands of minds. It’s about being able to be there and have journalists ask the questions that are not turned over in advance or are not controlled.

So I would not be arguing for a debate if in fact the candidates were truly available .... to journalists to ask all the questions that we need to ask. Hobbs is not answering, and it’s the same with Biggs.

LAUREN GILGER: We’re losing your connection there a little bit, but that is Elvia Díaz, former editorial page editor for the Arizona Republic. She writes now on Substack, Notas con Elvia Díaz. Elvia, thanks so much for coming on. Appreciate it.

ELVIA DÍAZ: Thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning. It’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, why are we still so obsessed with the tragic sinking of the Titanic more than a century later? And what is it about the 1997 blockbuster film that propelled that fascination?

KEVIN SANDLER: It’s a disaster movie. It’s a romance. It’s historical fiction. It’s action-adventure. It is a walk down memory lane. It is a lot of these kind of things that bring out certain emotions and feelings for people depending on how they view it through a particular genre.

MARK BRODIE: We’ll hear an author’s analysis of what made James Cameron’s Titanic so iconic.

LAUREN GILGER: But first, Dr. Octavio Rettig gave an unprecedented TEDx talk in 2012, telling his own story of recovery from addiction to crack cocaine with an unusual treatment: smoking the defense toxins of the Sonoran Desert toad. After his recovery, he became a worldwide guru for, quote-unquote, "smoking toad." Here he is speaking about it in Zurich in 2018.

OCTAVIO RETTIG: This medicine, it really saved my life. It helped me to shift from the crack. I was a crack addict, and I was born as an addict.

LAUREN GILGER: Dr. Rettig claimed that the practice was actually part of the Seri tribe’s long-lost native tradition in Mexico. And our next guest this morning found it was a claim that turned out to be specious at best. Kimon de Greef is the author of the new book out today, “The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence.” And I spoke with him more about Dr. Rettig and the story he told.

KIMON DE GREEF: He rose to prominence a few years later with this kind of irresistible story of not only his personal recovery, but that he had then used this toad medicine, as he started calling it, to treat addiction in an impoverished, remote tribal community in northern Mexico where the rise of narco-trafficking and cartels had spilled over into this methamphetamine addiction crisis.

And through that work, that he’d discovered that this extremely rare psychedelic practice was actually a long-lost tradition of the Seri Tribe, that it had been something that they had used pre-colonially and that it had been violently eradicated, stamped out during the Spanish colonial era.

So the TED Talk that he gave, which is at Burning Man in 2012, kind of outlined the story: healed myself, healed this tribe, resurrected their lost tradition, and now have their blessing to share this with humanity. And that’s kind of what he walked onto the stage with and what took him around the world. He became the most famous practitioner of toad medicine, and more than anyone else took this extremely obscure, hardcore psychedelic practice pretty close to the mainstream within just a few years.

LAUREN GILGER: Pretty close to the mainstream is a good way to put it. There is evidence — lots of evidence, right? — that this kind of drug can really help people, from veterans to addicts, right? Talk a little bit about the body of research here.

KIMON DE GREEF: So within just the last few years, there’s been great excitement among researchers, and more recently psychedelic drug developers, about turning this into a treatment for treatment-resistant depression, alcohol abuse disorder. There’s clinical trials going on at the moment using it as a treatment for postpartum depression.

All these kinds of conditions that are stubbornly resistant to modern psychiatry. In the kind of more underground, ceremonial, retreat space where toad and 5-MeO-DMT are used, combat veterans report overcoming PTSD and more.

LAUREN GILGER: So all of this brought you to Sonora in the end. And I want to talk about what was going on there, because it’s right in our backyard here in Arizona. And as this doctor kind of rises to fame, there’s sort of this industry that arises there, right? So talk a little bit about what that looked like. You called it kind of like psychedelic tourism happening.

KIMON DE GREEF: Yeah. So Octavio himself helped heal thousands in the end of people from addiction, from depression, from alcoholism, and so on. So his practice began to be traveling the world as this kind of neo-shaman. He incorporated these Indigenous rituals from the tribe that he’d connected with, their chants. He wore their beads and their clothing and would stage these ceremonies where 20, 30, sometimes 40 people would attend and smoke toad and have these rapturous experiences, many of them.

And word spread very quickly. And a kind of psychedelic tourism industry in Sonora evolved, where people came to seek out not only the toad and the experience of smoking toad, but consuming it in its putative ancestral home. People came looking for this thing, and I have no doubt that it caused them to have deeper experiences, believing that they were consuming this lost spiritual sacrament. ...

And what that looked like was people rocking up in this fairly God-forsaken pair of coastal villages, where poverty is extremely high, there’s trash in the streets, run-down concrete homes, suddenly started receiving people looking for spiritual enlightenment. And what happened from there is one of the stranger corners of this book, which has many strange corners.

LAUREN GILGER: Yes, it does. Tell us about that. There were some difficult consequences, right? Because you had people living in these impoverished conditions as you’re describing, going through dangerous cartel territory trying to track down these toads.

KIMON DE GREEF: Well, that is one of the consequences of this — is a massive surge in demand for the toad secretion itself, which means going and finding the toads, which used to be super abundant across the Sonoran Desert, including in Arizona. Only at certain times of year. Deserts are dry, toads need water, and so this species has a fairly remarkable adaptation where they go underground for nine months of the year. They just disappear. And then as soon as the monsoons start, they pop out, they mate, and they eat ravenously so that they can fatten up in time to go back underground with their baby toads.

And with the demand for toad medicine increasing, there’s been a massive increase in commercial toad collecting across Sonora, which involves people going out at night with torches and sacks, snatching up as many toads as they can, and taking them home to "milk," which involves squeezing their parotoid glands that explode sort of violently.

It has been very bad for the toads, although determining how bad is difficult because the area is so dangerous — most of Sonora — because of cartel activity that biologists can’t even go in and do the proper surveys required.

And I just think that’s a really cruel paradox. The search for enlightenment is feeding into this economy that’s harmful for the toads and the people who catch them, because many of the toad collectors crossing through cartel territory get beaten up, some have been murdered. It’s an extremely harsh environment to be obtaining this from.

LAUREN GILGER: Let me ask you before I let you go, Kimon, about the native people. You talked about Octavio kind of adopting their practices and their dress and their ceremonies and their chants and things like that. Did they use this substance?

KIMON DE GREEF: Well, that’s one of the other strange parts of the story, is that very, very, very few people in the Seri community use toad at all. Three-quarters of the community is Christian — evangelical Christians — and frankly seem to view the practice of toad smoking as something slightly demonic.

At the same time, the increasing flow of people to their territory — which is not just through Octavio now, but through all manner of psychedelic influencers and would-be neo-shamans — has become a kind of economic lifeline for the tribe.

Many people in Seri land dispute or reject the notion that toad smoking is an ancestral practice at all, and most of the evidence available seems to suggest that it’s not something that was used. But that’s sort of moot, because it’s probably what the tribe is best known for globally, and they have a long history of adapting to circumstances and taking advantage of what opportunities come their way.

And so there’s, again, this really strange, dissonant phenomenon playing out where there’s a community where very few people consume the substance, where people are arriving every day now, probably, to have this experience. nd it’s all just kind of downstream of Octavio himself connecting with these people and emerging with this narrative that I think suited him and served him more than it did anybody else, ultimately.

LAUREN GILGER: All right, we’ll leave it there. Kimon de Greef joining us, author of the new book, "The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence." Kimon, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for telling us about this and reporting this so deeply.

KIMON DE GREEF: Thanks for having me on. It’s my pleasure.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning. It is The Show here on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. Art critic Jackson Arn grew up in Phoenix, but it took a cross-country move to really appreciate the region. He talks about that in an essay he wrote for the publication Art in America titled "Phoenix Probably Shouldn’t Exist, But Eric Fischl and Frank Lloyd Wright Make It Feel Like the Future." The piece starts with this sentence: "As the plane starts its final descent, the first thought you might have is: How can all of this be here?" He goes on to explore how Wright, the famed architect, and Fischl, a less famous painter, viewed the Valley, and how he, in turn, thought about his hometown. Arn joins me to talk about this. And Jackson, as I mentioned, you grew up here. So let’s start with what inspired you to write this essay.

MARK BRODIE: Jackson, as I mentioned, you grew up here. So let’s start with what inspired you to write this essay.

JACKSON ARN: Oh gosh, I grew up in Arizona, definitely. I think that like a lot of people who grow up in Arizona, I took everything for granted in my hometown. I remember walking outside in the mornings and seeing purple mountains and these beautiful blue skies, and it was all just totally normal to me.

And then I moved away to New York for college, and it’s the old cliché that whenever you move away, you realize how strange and unique and interesting the place you just came from was. And so I was in the New York art world, and I couldn’t help but notice that Phoenix doesn’t always get that much respect in New York.

There’s a sort of New York aesthetic, I think it’s fair to say. There’s a very New York idea of the way that things are supposed to look and sound. And frankly, it doesn’t have a lot of space for the sort of colorfulness and vastness and just majesty of the Southwest. And so I sort of wanted to write about a different kind of aesthetic, a different way of looking at things.

MARK BRODIE: Well, and what led you to sort of look at it through the lens of Frank Lloyd Wright, who I think most people at least have a passing familiarity with; and the artist Eric Fischl, who I’m guessing more people maybe don’t know quite who he is?

JACKSON ARN: Yeah, maybe I could start with Frank Lloyd Wright, who definitely is someone who is a kind of household name and definitely someone who has lots of buildings all over the country, whether it’s the Rookery in Chicago or the Guggenheim on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

But Frank Lloyd Wright is someone who was, I think, deeply fascinated and even a little bit seduced by the Southwest. He was not an Arizonan by birth or anything, but like a lot of people who live more on the eastern side of the United States, he was really, really fascinated by the openness and the brightness and just the sort of newness of Arizona.

He would always say that Arizona is actually a very new kind of geology. And so he started this school, Taliesin West, out in Arizona, in the desert, and he was able to convince all sorts of disciples of his — young aspiring architects — to move out to Arizona just to study with him and be inspired by the landscape.

And then Fischl, you’re absolutely right, he’s not as well known. But in art criticism, I think you have to write about what you love. And as I say in the article, there are some artists who just grab you with two fists as soon as you see them. And I can still remember the day that I walked into a gallery called Skarstedt in New York and I saw his paintings and I was just sort of riveted.

And I think one reason I was riveted is that I saw his paintings of pools and suburban lawns and those strange bungalow houses, and as an Arizonan, I just thought: “This is what I know. This is what I grew up with.” But it’s a kind of aesthetic that you don’t actually see that often in New York. And I just really appreciate Fischl for bringing some of that to the New York art world.

MARK BRODIE: Is it fair to say, do you think, that Fischl takes maybe more of a — I don’t want to say pessimistic — but not as a happy view on maybe Phoenix or the Southwest, as opposed to, as you reference, Frank Lloyd Wright, who was actively trying to recruit people to come here?

JACKSON ARN: I think there’s some truth in that, definitely. Wright, when he talks about the desert, it’s the sublime. It’s something that you just have to come and see with the naked eye. You have to see it. With Fischl, it’s definitely a little more dark and even a little bit dystopian at times. It’s so bright and it’s so lively that it’s almost lurid sometimes. It’s like none of it is supposed to be here.

And one reason that I am so struck by it is that I know very well what it feels like to fly into Arizona in a plane and look down, and you just see all of these pools and lawns and, especially now, I think you think about all the millions of gallons of water that have to be pumped from thousands of miles away.

And at least for me, there’s just sort of this voice in my head that says, almost like, “This isn’t supposed to be here. It’s eerie that it’s all here — all this greenness and blueness in the middle of the desert.” And I think that Fischl definitely speaks to that.

MARK BRODIE: Well, and as you point out, like some number of his paintings include pools and lawns and palm trees and things that are not necessarily native to the desert, whereas many of Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings at Taliesin West are built from the materials of the desert. It seems like kind of an interesting juxtaposition.

JACKSON ARN: Definitely, yeah. You can think of Arizona maybe in terms of what has always been here and what has been brought here or flown in here. And Frank Lloyd Wright was definitely inspired by the material of the desert. If you go out to Taliesin West — and I would highly recommend that everybody do — you can see not just that the physical material of the building is the actual stone and rock and granite of the desert, but the actual shapes and the colors and the forms of the building are inspired by the mountains around it.

With Eric Fischl, I think it’s true. I think it’s true. The main things in Fischl are the pools and the lawns and these things that aren’t native to Arizona at all, that have to be pumped in from thousands of miles away.

MARK BRODIE: So, having looked at these two creators — one architect, one a painter — and having written this essay, has it changed the way that you think about your hometown at all?

JACKSON ARN: Yeah, I think as much as anything else, learning about Wright and learning about Fischl — this architect and this painter, as you say — it inspires me to learn more about my own hometown. I mean, I’m someone who grew up in Phoenix, and I didn’t know any of the history of my own city when I was younger. I took it all for granted. And I just took it for granted that the pools belonged here and the lawns belonged here and everything that was was the way it was supposed to be.

Whereas when I look at Frank Lloyd Wright and as I look at Fischl and as I’ve learned more about them, I think it encourages me to just be more in touch with the city that I’m in and take a step back and think about how unique it is and how incredible it is that it’s come to be here in this form.

MARK BRODIE: So now when you fly back in and you look out the airplane windows and you see all the houses and the roads and the pools and the palm trees, do you have different thoughts going through your head than when you did maybe 8-0 years ago? Or is it still, “Oh my God, that’s a lot of pools. They shouldn’t be there”?

JACKSON ARN: My thoughts have definitely changed in that time. I mean, the city is still growing so quickly, and the city is still very new, actually. It has this rich tradition and it’s connected, obviously, to American art and American modernism, but I think 10 years ago when I would fly in and look down and see the city, I would think this feels like almost a settled thing or a finished thing. Whereas now when I look down at it, I almost think it’s only just beginning. Things are still getting warmed up, so to speak, out here.

MARK BRODIE: All right. That is art critic Jackson Arn. We’ve been talking about his essay in the publication Art in America called “Phoenix Probably Shouldn’t Exist, But Eric Fischl and Frank Lloyd Wright Make It Feel Like the Future.” Jackson, thanks so much for the conversation. I appreciate it.

JACKSON ARN: Thanks so much, Mark.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning. It’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Mark Brodie.

LAUREN GILGER: And I’m Lauren Gilger. OK now, Mark, let me take you back in a pop culture time machine to 1997.

MARK BRODIE: I am ready. Let’s do it. Sounds from the film “Titanic,” of course. Lauren, how many times did you see that in the theater?

LAUREN GILGER: Oh man, at least four or five. But my big sister, I remember, saw it 13 times and kept every movie stub.

MARK BRODIE: That is a lot of time for a pretty — admittedly — pretty big cultural moment.

LAUREN GILGER: It was such a huge cultural moment. And the story of Titanic kind of always has been, since the ship sank in 1912. There was a 1958 film called “A Night to Remember” before that 1997 James Cameron blockbuster. There was a Tony Award-winning musical, countless books and more.

And now you can immerse yourself in the disaster in a whole new way: “Titanic: The Immersive Voyage” opened in Old Town Scottsdale last month. It features full-scale reproductions of parts of the ship, plus 3D views and a virtual reality tour of the wreck site more than two miles under the ocean.

So what is it that still captivates us about the Titanic? ASU film professor Kevin Sandler has some ideas. He co-edited a book about it back in 1999 called “Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster.” And he came into our studios recently to talk to me more about it.

Arizona State University

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KEVIN SANDLER: Well, it was considered to be the most expensive, you know, the biggest spectacle movie by a director potentially out of control. And so people were prepared for this movie to tank.

LAUREN GILGER: Really? I didn’t know that.

KEVIN SANDLER: And it had a premiere in Japan. The response was amazing. And thus when it hit globally, it just became this massive hit and made more money its second week than it did its first week.

LAUREN GILGER: And it was incredibly expensive to make, right? And long. Like I remember as a kid it was on two VHS tapes, right? It was unique in many ways. It was an outstanding film in many ways.

KEVIN SANDLER: Yeah. I mean, long. Particularly at that time; now we’re accustomed to seeing movies that are three hours in length. But back then, that was hubris, you know. To make a movie that long, that was like, “Gone with the Wind” kind of long.

LAUREN GILGER: It better be that good, right?

KEVIN SANDLER: It better be good. And people were just expecting it to sink.

LAUREN GILGER: Just like the ship.

KEVIN SANDLER: Yeah. But it did not. It was this massive hit, as you’re outlining there.

LAUREN GILGER: And it’s kind of maintained at some level or another the public’s fascination in the decades since then — like we’re seeing now, this new exhibition opening in Scottsdale, this immersive Titanic thing. It pops up here and there in pop culture and is still a cultural touchstone, I think, to even younger generations.

KEVIN SANDLER: Yeah, people are still fascinated with Titanic. I mean, they watch the movie, they explore the history. They continue to want to buy into the disaster. They bought into the makeup, they bought into — they wanted to buy the Heart of the Ocean. They wanted to dance to the song in clubs. I mean, the fascination with Titanic has, you know, been there since, you know, the ship went down in 1912.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. And you edited a book kind of shortly after the movie came out about this and kind of exploring the fascination with Titanic. One of the things that you talk about in the book is that Titanic is and was popular because of its popularity.

KEVIN SANDLER: Yeah, I mean, it became really popular when the movie “A Night to Remember” — the book and “A Night to Remember” — came out in the late ’50s. And was really expensive, was the most expensive British movie made at the time. In the same way it was the most expensive movie made at the time when Cameron’s “Titanic” came out. And so you had this kind of spectacular, majestic, emotional, expensive reinterpretation and visual of this ship going down. Because unlike other disasters — like the Hindenburg, that was filmed — Titanic was not filmed, right, of course.

And so you had to visualize what happened. And because of an iceberg, because of its size, because of its cold, because of the amount of people on board, that you can just tell this incredible story, emotional, dramatic story in many, many, many ways.

LAUREN GILGER: Is there something maybe a little darker here, you think, Kevin? Like we in American culture, I think, tend to have a fascination with tragedy. Is this part of that, you think?

KEVIN SANDLER: I think there’s that fascination with tragedy with us and certainly in other countries. Certainly tragedy, particularly of disastrous proportions. I mean, this is like a disaster movie that continues to perpetuate in Hollywood movies ever since this movie came out. I mean, we’ve constantly — all these action movies are kind of end-of-the-world kind of scenarios.

And in many ways, Titanic is kind of like the end of the world for many people with many people who died, but with some survivors. And so it’s a disaster movie, it’s a romance, it’s historical fiction, it’s action-adventure, it is a walk down memory lane. It is a lot of these kind of things that bring out certain emotions and feelings for people depending on how they view it through a particular genre.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Is there a note of nostalgia now in the continued popularity of not just the story of “Titanic,” but the film itself?

KEVIN SANDLER: You know, that’s a good question. You know, nostalgia is one of those things. Nostalgia for a pre-technological time, nostalgia for an America at the turn of the century. But there’s also this kind of fascination with, should it be done? Can it be done? Can technology take us so far?

And we have, certainly just a few years ago in which we had the Titan submersible that exploded on the way down to viewing the Titanic.

LAUREN GILGER: To go see it. Another big cultural moment just all about this, yeah.

KEVIN SANDLER: Yeah, and so Titanic kind of just, you know, just when you thought Titanic was over, somehow it comes up again. And here we have this Scottsdale exhibit in which you can now experience Titanic by sitting in a lifeboat with 3D projections or wearing VR goggles to experience what it is that you’ve experienced before, particularly in the Cameron movie.

LAUREN GILGER: There’s a level, especially in the film, that explores this, but I think just in any kind of historical study of what happened on Titanic, about class too, right? And that’s another kind of perpetual American obsession, I think, and maybe uniquely American one.

KEVIN SANDLER: Yeah, I mean, I think for many British people who watched the movie — and it’s discussed in the book — this is a movie about really class struggle, about the people in the middle class, the lower classes, and the upper class, and people moving to a perhaps classless middle-class society in the United States.

But I mean, it’s kind of a movie that imagines something different while at the same time imagining closing something off. So it imagines kind of class equality, imagines female equality and empowerment, it imagines true love, it imagines sacrifice and honor in the face of danger, while at the same time cautioning us: Don’t be too proud. Don’t be too overconfident, you know, all these things.

So it provides this kind of well of emotional touchpoints for us to glop onto.

LAUREN GILGER: Do you think all of the kind of media obsession and this kind of new thing where you can immerse yourself in the Titanic experience — and the film, too — do you think that it overshadows the actual real human tragedy that took place?

KEVIN SANDLER: Uh, yes.

LAUREN GILGER: Simple as that?

KEVIN SANDLER: It allows us to experience the sense of chance, the sense of danger, the sense that sometimes things aren’t fair in a very safe space. We know we can’t control nature. We know we can’t control our destiny. But it shows people encountering the most horrific things and either coming out ahead or not coming out ahead and asks us to imagine what might we have done.

LAUREN GILGER: Are there any cultural equivalents to this, you think, Kevin?

KEVIN SANDLER: I always imagine people wanting to continue to buy into this disaster is the same way that they buy into say Disney, or they buy into Marvel, that they want to experience this film that really moved them in many different ways. So it could be, “Oh, I’m going to go see ‘Titanic’ the musical again,” which came out and won the Tony just like the movie won the Academy Award. “I want to go visit the real Titanic below. I want to go visit this exhibition. I want to go to Southampton where the Titanic was launched.” That “I want to experience the same feelings that I did that first time that I saw a movie that I fell in love with.”

LAUREN GILGER: All right, we’ll leave it there. ASU film and media studies professor Kevin Sandler joining us. Kevin, thank you so much for coming in. I appreciate it very much.

KEVIN SANDLER: Thank you.

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