Podcast Review: Midnight Son

An Obligatory Disclaimer:

This podcast is only available on Audible. Thanks to my mom for letting me listen while I was home. I think it is more than worth it if Audible is already in your podcast rotations. If it isn't, maybe try a trial to listen to this one.

The Podcast Review: Midnight Son from Audible

This podcast came to me via Resonate. James Dommek and Issac Kestenbaum gave a phenomenal talk and I just had to listen to the full thing. The talk was about stories keeping us alive, and how it wove into the story of Midnight Son. Now listening to the podcast, I have this whole new understanding of what this means.

To give a personal context here: I’m pretty Irish in the genetic sense. I don’t have a relationship with my Irish family, but I know we came from somewhere about the northeast of Ireland. So imagine when I go to Sligo for a friend’s wedding, and get chatting with a shopkeep with the biggest, bushiest eyebrows I’ve ever seen on a man. He hears my Irish-side family name and goes “oh so you’re a writer” without batting an eye. It filled me with the weirdest sensation of agreement, and rejection. I had just started Mentally? A Magpie, then. I still have some feelings on being considered a writer. 

Like, even now, when someone quotes my reviews I don’t always realize I wrote that. Like, yeah. I did. And someone liked it? So I live this tension that our main voice has in this podcast. Like there’s a tension between who you are, who you want to be, and what life will make you. The tension isn’t always bad, but it sometimes takes a push or pull in the right direction to shake out what it all means, or what it can do for us, or a society. Some voices are stronger, or find the right moment faster, to breathe life into a story that needs to be heard. 

James Dommek is an Alaska Native of the Iñupiaq tribe. He’s worked in film, music, and obviously now podcast production. He also is the great grandson of one of the last great Inupac storytellers. I think from the outside, anyone would say that he has to say some of that in him - I don’t think you work in these industries if there’s not something cooking under the production side of it all. That’s just something there. 

What started as a curiosity about a man who spoke about native legends in a courtroom defense, turned into something that dove back and forth between the indigenous and the colonized, the living and the spiritual, the foreign and the personal. 

I think what really got me about this podcast is the way the story keeps turning back to the personal. A well told story is universal, we know this. In Midnight Son you can see as the threads of history, culture, and reality are woven together, with new and old information. I mention my Irish heritage here, not just because of that call that may feel genetic in us, but also because of the connection between the Irish and any indigenous community in the United States. 

There are parallels of persecution, stigma, and forced assimilation. From losing native language and cultural norms to survive, to being left in positions of powerlessness that lead to the bottle rather than any help, because the system isn’t for you. It’s sometimes hard to remember, but like stories keep tradition alive through time, stories keep memory and connection alive.

This podcast is considered true crime, because it follows how a man convicted of attempted murder went from near Hollywood fame to prison. I think it’s more than that. Genres are hard to pin down. Midnight Son is a memoir, it’s a biography, it’s an exploration of a single man that reflects back a whole societal relationship. Like the Irish with the British, the United States with the Indigenous, these balances that thrive on power and control mean so much is lost. Culture, community, connection. It’s more than that. It ends up being people, memory, and that spirit that makes us human. 

In telling this story, and the way that it is particularly explained, we are given a zoom in on how this impacts real people. Not just this vague idea of a lost culture or community, but real people telling stories that probably could’ve been them if the cosmic dice landed a different way. In guiding us through this, there is a truth woven into these soundwaves. Even as damage is done, as we try to repair and get better, we have ups and downs. A tapestry of emotions, focused on this one, forgotten tundra, is encompassed in this podcast. Through tragedy, and through hope - through stories something beautiful survives.

Listen to Midnight Son on Audible. Check out the Hulu Adaptation Blood and Myth.

If you want to read more reviews of Midnight Son check them out on Greatpods.co

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