Kent and Wonder discuss the documentary Never Look Away using the untimed birth chart of photojournalist Margaret Moth. Themes that emerge are people who put their lives on the line for things they believe in, what it might take for someone to be both a risk taker and an adrenaline junkie but also deeply compassionate and connected to those around her. Astrologically we are relate this to Moth’s Mars in Pisces conjoined Jupiter.
Distribution: Currently on Theatrical Run, more info
Director: Lucy Lawless
Run Time: 85 minutes
Astrological Data: Margaret Moth was born on August 21, 1951 in Gisborne, New Zealand. Rodden Rating: X, Source: Wikipedia
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.479] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. Wonder Bright: And this is Wonder Bright. Kent Bye: And welcome to the Story All The Way Down podcast, where we're breaking down the archetypal dynamics of stories. With the second season, we're focusing on the documentaries from Sundance 2024. And this is episode number four of eight on our section on Identity. So today we're going to be diving into a documentary called Never Look Away, which is a part of the World Cinema Documentary Competition and is directed by Lucy Lawless. So, Wonder, I'm wondering if you'd be willing to read the synopsis for Never Look Away.
[00:00:45.467] Wonder Bright: New Zealand-born, groundbreaking CNN camerawoman Margaret Moth risks it all to show the reality of war from inside the conflict, staring down danger and confronting those who perpetuate it. Moth's intrepid energy and kinetic lust are rendered beautifully in this documentary, which deftly captures both her powerful personality and the nascent development of the 24-hour news cycle. Never Look Away asks hard-hitting questions about where our desire for conflict coverage comes from, whether it can ever be satiated, and what we are running from when we are absorbed by work and by relentless global news. Moth's indelible commitment to her work, her striking aesthetic, her deeply mysterious nature, and her gargantuan contributions to the field of journalism all come to the fore in this potent biopic. Renowned actor Lucy Lawless, we all know her from Xena, Warrior Princess and Battlestar Galactica and Parks and Recreation to name a few, steps behind the camera in this impressive directorial debut. Lawless creates a distinctively female Kiwi lens to cover this titanic career, showing both the horrors and life affirming dimensions of war from a woman's point of view. And that synopsis comes from Sundance programmer Ash Hoyle.
[00:02:05.895] Kent Bye: Yeah, so Margaret Moth is a complete and utter badass.
[00:02:11.600] Wonder Bright: In short. Words fail.
[00:02:13.941] Kent Bye: She's such a fearless chronicler of these wars in a way that she was really putting her own life in peril. And in fact, part of the story that unfolds is that at some point she is shot in Sarajevo in Sniper Alley and it really changed the course of her career, but it becomes this turning point in the film where - it becomes part of her healing journey, because she still finds a way to persevere and go back out into these war zones and continue to document all these different conflicts. And so a lot of the images that we end up seeing of these wars are coming from her. And so she was working for CNN and you kind of trace throughout the course of the story, like, her open and free spirit and almost, like, an adrenaline junkie, the way she went out into these extremely risky situations. And at the same time, she had a little bit more of an open relationship when it came to all of her different partners and lovers. And so there's a tension here between her career and her love life that sort of follows throughout the course of this film. And we end up getting some of the deepest insights about Margaret Moth from some of her former lovers. So yeah, just a really beautiful honoring of her body of work, but also her spirit and really unpacking who this person was, what was driving her and these dimensions of her character that made her such a fearless badass.
[00:03:42.972] Wonder Bright: Yeah and shout out to Lucy Lawless in her directorial debut! In the Q&A she makes it clear that she didn't actually intend to direct it but then she'd been asked to produce this, and then she got far enough into production where she’s, “I can’t!” like, “I have to!” - and it's such a fantastic - Like, the way she's broken down this story, her vision is so clear. And the fact that this is Lawless's directorial debut is honestly kind of astonishing. She does a masterful job of weaving together archival footage and interviews that she obviously was able to get with people who were close to Moth in her lifetime. And one of the main things that strikes me about the film that I think is due to the fact that Lawless was really a competent director, Margaret Moth emerges as a very complicated, paradoxical, contradictory person. And Lawless doesn't try to make it pat and yet you still have this completely coherent experience of who this person was. So Lawless doesn't try to solve any mysteries. In fact, she seems to kind of chase them and allow them to exist concurrently, like the contradictions exist concurrently with one another in a way that is - the most interesting thing about human beings is that, you know, as Walt Whitman says, “I contain multitudes, I contradict myself”. And Lawless really allows this complicated person who probably couldn't exist in the absence of being so complicated, because the work that Moth chose for herself was extraordinary. She was driven to go to war zones and capture it. And she would, time and again in the film, we see how she’s putting herself at risk in a way that other people around her, photojournalists and journalists alike, they weren't taking the same kinds of risks that she was. But there's this part of her that Lawless explicates from the very beginning, even before she became a photojournalist, where she's really drawn to living on the edge. She’s doing a lot of drugs in Austin, Texas with the first boyfriend we meet who is 17 when Moth meets him and I think she's like around 30. And they meet in Texas because Moth gets a hold of him because he is, you know, the local drug dealer through this cafe that he works at. And he's just approaching his senior year in high school, and he's a straight-A student. But basically, once he meets Moth, he's just with her 24-7. They're doing drugs, they’re roller skating until 5 in the morning on LSD. And they're just living this very extreme life for quite a few years until she eventually becomes a photojournalist at CNN. The main crux of the story was about the extremities that Moth craved in her life and how she pursued them and she just seemed to have this thirst for feeling experiences really, really strongly. I mean, we do learn that she likely had an incredibly troubled childhood with a lot of abuse. Lawless interviewed Moth's siblings. And also when she interviews the young man that she was involved with in Texas, he reports how Moth would cry and be overwhelmed with despair at different points and that she would draw. And she made these drawings when they were together that he kept and gave to Lawless for this film that are just so terrifying and really dark. So you have this sense of a really difficult childhood. Although the actual events are never named, it's very clear that there were demons that she couldn't escape. And it's entirely possible that like a lot of people who grow up with really traumatic, physically dangerous situations, you then continue to be drawn to those types of extreme cases throughout life. You know, we hear about people who go to war who then can't really come back to normal life and they actually only feel okay when they're at war. And that sort of thing can happen to people from childhood as well, that you then are just actually the only thing that's comfortable and familiar is really difficult situations. And so the whole film ends up sort of feeling like this testimony to someone who is able to take that dark matter in their life and then create something out of their life that in a way kind of elevates their ability to be in those difficult situations, that she's able to create a life where she's able to add meaning to what she went through. And even though we don't know what it is that she went through, and even if she wouldn't necessarily articulate it in that way herself, This is somebody who took really dark matter inside of her and was able to create a really meaningful life that made a real difference in the world around her. And she was able to do it directly out of that dark matter in a way that very few people could do. She did extraordinary things.
[00:09:16.676] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah, there was certainly a deep motivation of trying to do the morally right thing to bear witness to these atrocities around the world that I feel like there was a need to want to document these human rights violations and to share them with the world. And I think there was also a thread of the story where they're talking about the horrors of war, but also the visceral excitement and the adrenaline rush of being in a war zone and covering the war. And so there's this tricky balance between someone who's an adrenaline junkie versus someone who's putting their life in danger in order to cover and bear witness to these human rights violations. For me, there seems to be this strong signature of Mars driving her to take these actions to put her life in danger and to capture these images. We do have a date of her birth, we don't have a time, so we don't know the specifics of how her planets are falling into different houses. But she does have Mars at 6° Pisces conjunct Jupiter at 10° Pisces. And that is trining to Uranus at six degrees Cancer. And so you have this Mars / Jupiter trining Uranus. And so Mars being, like, taking action, Jupiter, the expansive, almost like extreme adrenaline junkie with that Uranus to me kind of speaks to this unpredictability of being in these war zones that she's putting herself into these situations. So there's a strong signature of Mars when I just watched the film without knowing anything about her chart. And I think there's also very interesting tension when you think about work-life balance, where you have the 1st house is the self, the 7th house is the other, your partners, your relationships. the 4th house is home, and then the 10th house is your career. So each of these, astrologically speaking, are like square relationships and oppositions, which means that there's a tension there between the self-identity of Margaret and then who she is in relationship to her lovers, but yet her career is pulling her away from being in a specific location, which creates these tensions between - she's going off to these war zones and leaving her partner behind or her young lover partner that provides a lot of context throughout the course of the film. He didn't want to go into these war zones and so he's staying in his home in Texas and she's going off and she's traveling around and then you hit a situation in the film where she gets injured. And so then gets put into this six house situation where she's trying to deal with all these injuries that she's gotten from her work and being in these war zones. And then because she was not committing to being tethered to any one of her partners, she was sort of left alone for that period. And so much of her identity was also defined around her sense of beauty. And then because she got shot in the face, then that was transforming her own sense of self-identity and feeling like who's going to want to be with her after she's been disfigured in that way. So there's a lot of dimensions of her work and her career and her home and her identity that are in this inherent tension that we're exploring throughout the course of this film.
[00:12:24.318] Wonder Bright: Yeah. Yeah, you definitely feel this extreme tension between her identity, her partnerships, her experience of where she might belong in terms of any kind of sense of home versus career, which really seems to override everything so that ultimately she is so identified with the career, with being in these war zones, with covering news about the war around the world, that that really seems to be the story, the primary story of her life and everything else is a supporting player in that main drama. And I agree with you. It's a total Mars story. When I read the synopsis, I'm like, oh, a woman at war. And I was like, well, Venus, what does Venus do when Venus is at war? And then we're watching the film and I'm like, oh, no, this is just Mars. What does Mars do? What is up with Margaret's Mars? The question that you just end up coming away because she's she is a force of nature. Like you're watching this film. And if you're not an astrologer, you're like, what makes this person tick? And if you're an astrologer, you're like, what is her chart? And then you're looking at your chart and it's still just, I mean, like, yeah, we can look at her Jupiter and we can look at her Mars and we can look at Jupiter in Pisces conjunct Mars. And it makes some sense out of it. And at the same time, this person is a force of nature. She is her own creation in a way that very few people are able to accomplish in the world. And she's an extraordinary testament to the possibility of free will, frankly. This is such a good film. It's such a good story. I'm so glad to know Margaret Moth because this was not a name that I was familiar with before at all. And I do just want to talk a little bit about that Jupiter-Mars being in Pisces because the thing that is so striking about that, the ways in which Margaret Moth demonstrates that signature so beautifully is that we typically associate Pisces with, especially in the body of a woman, with someone much more like Tammy Faye Messner, who we covered earlier in this series because there's a biopic about her as well. And she has a really strong Pisces, Jupiter expression in her chart. And so we typically think of Pisces as being this very compassionate, kind of a soft sign, really, because Pisces is a water sign, and it's the last of the water signs before the year starts again in Aries. So it's the sign that's most associated with Christlike consciousness or this ability to like turn the other cheek or to have pure compassion. I've heard it said that Pisces is the sign that's most associated with psychic phenomena. Whether that's true, I don't know. But when you look at Jupiter in Pisces conjunct any planet, the thing is that Jupiter actually rules Pisces. And Jupiter is the planet that Demetra George says is about your capacity to search for truth and ethical meaning. So where we find Jupiter, we often find where we are able to have faith and where we're able to understand the truer nature of ourselves and the world around us. And Jupiter also has this way of just kind of making things bigger. Like where you have Jupiter in your chart, you're going to find that you kind of like people who are in that sign. So like, so it's quite possible that Margaret Moth liked other Pisces because she has Jupiter in Pisces. So there's like an attunement to people who are Piscean in some way. So there's a kind of, like, you're drawn like a moth to the flame of where your Jupiter is. You just kind of naturally sort of, like, them in a way. And when Jupiter is conjunct something, it's sort of like makes us like whatever planet it's joined with, it brings forth more of that planet's qualities in some way. And then because Jupiter is in Pisces, it's in its own sign, so it's really, really strong. It has a lot of power in its own sign. A planet that rules a sign and is in that sign kind of gets to dictate the terms of what happens around it. when you have Mars and Pisces conjunct a Jupiter and Pisces, now we have that curiosity about Mars ruled experiences. You have a deep curiosity and the search for truth and ethical meaning around areas of war, around topics of going out there and taking risks around physical risk, especially because Mars is the planet that we're going to associate with athletes and warriors. So Jupiter and Mars in Pisces, you just see this sort of extremity, like a thirst for risk taking and being on the edge. But it comes through this Piscean realm of deep feeling, like a kind of compassion for things simultaneously. So in that way, her life as a photojournalist makes a great deal of sense because she, as Lawless explores, was really able to be with the people that she was recording. And she sort of was a bit of a self-described misanthrope in different ways, but that isn't how the people who loved her actually experienced her. She could be cold and slightly disassociated in certain realms. But then in other realms, they report that she was just the most connected, most committed person. And the way that the people in these war zones responded to her was with real love and like joy. So you do see that Piscean like ability to connect and have compassion that had to be at the heart of how she was able to get the footage that she did.
[00:18:42.734] Kent Bye: Yeah. And, you know, as, as I was watching this film, one of the significations that I put down was fire, the fire element, because there's so much of just taking action and being in the thick of things. But then when I look at her chart, there's actually like no planets and fire, there's Pluto and Leo, but that's hardly a personal planet. very little signatures directly of fire. We don't have her time chart, so we don't know how her houses are playing out. And we can look at these archetypal principles, but when we actually look at the chart, sometimes there's no signature that actually is reflecting that.
[00:19:16.920] Wonder Bright: Well, in fairness, we're not looking at her chart. This, to me, does seem like somebody who very likely has a fire sign rising. you know, like, fire sign rising is motivated by the desire to not ever have anyone else have power or control over them. And Margaret Moth 100% fits that bill. Obviously, pure speculation, but just because we don't see fire represented in the planets on the day of her birth doesn't mean she doesn't have fire in her chart.
[00:19:45.475] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's a good point. Well, as you start to think about Never Look Away, in the context of some sort of remedial measures, who would you prescribe this film to?
[00:19:55.578] Wonder Bright: This is a film that I would prescribe for people who have a really strong Mars and maybe don't always know what to do with it. Not because Margaret Moth solves that, because I think that's one of those great conundrums that we're born with and we struggle with and the struggle and the question might sometimes be the whole point. Like it doesn't necessarily have to be solved. But because Margaret Moth in her tenacity and in her surviving events and in her incandescent thirst for living and adventure is really emblematic of the best kind of Mars in many ways. And her pursuit of excellence in her craft is another thing that I think is something that Adam Gainsbourg has pointed out about Mars. His idea is that Mars is about where we pursue excellence. I don't always know that I agree with that, but when it comes to Margaret Moth, I 100% see it. And it's also worth pointing out that because we don't have a birth time, we don't know what sign her moon is in. But we do know that the moon moved into Scorpio in New Zealand, probably mid-morning that day. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this is someone with the Scorpio moon. I just don't think there's any doubt about it, frankly, because that points even more strongly in the direction of Mars being a really important planet in her chart because Mars rules Scorpio. But also because of how enigmatic she was. And that kind of enigma is often associated with Scorpio and particularly with Scorpio Moon. The Moon in Scorpio is said to be in fall. And at the same time, Moon in Scorpio people are some of the most tenacious, stubborn people you're ever going to meet. Some of my favorite people on the planet have had Scorpio moons. And they do not give an inch and often that has come to them because they've had to survive circumstances and it's left them needing to be suspicious in a way about the world around them to make sure that they stay safe. But you will also never find someone more loyal or more dedicated to their cause than a Scorpio Moon person. And so I feel like it sort of points more to that Mars expression in her life and the tenacity that Mars is capable of. But regardless of whether or not her moon is actually in Scorpio, it is certainly within the Via Combusta. which is the degree between 15 Libra and 15 Scorpio where planets are said to be in the burnt road because neither of the lights have dignity in those areas. So her Moon being in the Via Combusta sort of describes that expression in her chart of searching and not necessarily finding, but the search ends up being the thing. And there's something just really powerful in the way that she embodies that expression and embodies it through her pursuits and through her thirst for adventure.
[00:23:25.119] Kent Bye: Yeah. And when I think about what I want to bear witness to in this film, I think it, It has to be Margaret Moth for me, just to honor her commitment to documenting a lot of these atrocities of war, human rights violations, and her fearlessness to take action and to put her life in danger. You were talking about the Via Combusta, and I was just thinking about how she was shot in this area in Sarajevo that was called Sniper Alley. So many different anecdotes that were shared by her colleagues where all hell is breaking loose. And where's Margaret? Oh, she's at the place where she's going to be documenting whatever is happening, but still putting her life in danger. And so, yeah, Lucy Lawless was talking about how she's from New Zealand and how Margaret Moth, who's also a New Zealander, that there's this desire to try to capture the stories of people from New Zealand that have gone out and really made it. And so she was such a striking figure and character that had this really exotic punk rock, exciting life that she had lived. And I'm so glad that she was able to capture a lot of the untold stories of her relationships during that time as well, because I feel like that was such an anchor between her professional life, but also her personal relationships that you're really juxtaposing those two. And so just the way that she was able to live life to the fullest, even despite all of the injuries that she got along the way.
[00:24:55.054] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I want to bear witness to Margaret Moth by way of just noting that she named herself Margaret Moth. I think she named herself Margaret Gypsy Moth. And this is not something that's explicated in the film at all. But to me, it is so evocative that she chose that name for herself. because we think of moths as being nocturnal creatures that are drawn to the flame. And she wore her hair dyed jet black with these black circles around her eyes made out of coal. She's just extremely dramatic looking even though she was born with blonde hair. She created this dark, saturnine expression that was really of the night. And here she is drawn to the battle. Here she is drawn to the fire, to the flame. And she returned again and again until she died, really, until she just couldn't do it anymore. And I love that she gave herself that name and in giving herself a name, a way of being, and she claimed something for herself and her spirit that will outlive her body. And I feel really grateful to have had an experience of her now.
[00:26:23.837] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah, well, that's all that we have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Story All the Way Down podcast. And if you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider signing up to the newsletter at storyallthewaydown.com. Thanks for listening. Wonder Bright: Thank you.
