163: Dereck Daschke

Nostalgia Interviews with Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Dereck Daschke whom I had the great pleasure of interviewing in Salt Lake City when we were both reviewing films at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2023 for the Journal of Religion and Film. Dereck teaches Religious Studies at Truman State University in Missouri and, like me, works in the area of religion and film.
We find out about Dereck’s dissertation in Graduate School on Freud and the apocalypse and Dereck reflects on whether film can be a stand in for religious experience. We also discuss apocalyptic revenge fantasies and the Mad Max films.
Dereck talks about his Lutheran upbringing in the Chicago suburbs and we find out why he has always been drawn to academia. He has a seminal memory of seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey in the basement of his local public library. We find out why this film made such an impact.
The psychology of transcendence has always interested Dereck, and we learn about Dereck’s interest in Bob Dylan and his memories of seeing Dylan and Tom Petty in concert in the mid-80s.
We talk about Dereck’s stand up comedy, and how there is a fine line between teaching and stand up, in terms of performance. We learn about the processes behind this as well as what Dereck learns from teaching, and how it can be so fulfilling.
We discover what made Dereck study religion, and how it overlaps with psychology and mental health, and why religion is a bone he can’t let go of, and we find out why films and religion are involved in the same sort of enterprise in terms of challenging the way we understand reality to work.
We discover why Twelve Monkeys and Monty Python and the Holy Grail are such pivotal films for Dereck, and we learn that Dereck is ordained to officiate at Dudeist weddings.
Then, towards the end of the interview, we find out what his younger self would have expected to do, and Dereck reflects on the question of what is the myth or story we are living through, and how we are in the middle of our own stories. We also learn why Dereck is more of a looking forward person today than he used to be.