Case #5 Source Code

From Gimlet, I'm Starly Kine, and this is Mystery Show. Every week, I solve a new mystery. Mysteries that can't be solved online. Mysteries you can't solve yourself. Up until now, there hasn't been anyone to help with this. That person is now me. Those mysteries. Tomorrow, I'll find out all I should know. Those mysteries. This week's mystery belongs to David. David is a former political cartoonist who runs an artisanal pencil sharpening company out of his home in the country. You send him your unsharpened pencils and he sends them back to you, sharpened. I'm telling you this so you'll understand that David is both the man who appreciates the more nuanced details of life and a man with a lot of time on his hands. One afternoon, David rang me up and said he had something pressing he needed to speak with me about. I caught the 318 train up to his house and sat in the second car from the front in the window seat. Upon my arrival, David greeted me warmly. "How are you?" I said cordially, gripping his hand with the strength I would have hardly been given credit for. David quickly ushered me into his study and after brushing off the pencil shavings from his sofa, gestured for me to sit down. Then he explained his predicament to me. So it all started when I went to go see this movie called Source Code and Jake Gyllenhaal was the star and I thought it was a really good movie but there was one thing about it that struck me as a little uncanny. It was that sometimes in the movie Jake Gyllenhaal looked kind of a short and other times he looked really tall which didn't seem like part of the movie, it didn't seem like it was a plot point element or anything and I never noticed things like that with celebrities. So David turned to every amateur sleuths, jealous, undermining best friend, the internet. He typed in "How tall is Jake Gyllenhaal?" and a website called celebheights.com popped up. David thought it would be the end of the investigation. But it was just the beginning because the printout on Jake Gyllenhaal, I have it here and it's a contested piece of data, I think is the only way to say it. So the entry begins. Jake Gyllenhaal Height, US actor from Brokeback Mountain. He is quoted at age 23 saying, "I'm happily six feet tall and then the remaining 11 pages are devoted to people arguing and screaming at each other about whether he was speaking truthfully when he said he was happily six feet tall." David says it's the infinite jest of Jake Gyllenhaal height-related discourse. The disputants are, as far as I can tell from all over the world, it's an international debate. And are these people who know him, where they... Well, that's a great question. I'll give you an example. Let me find one. Okay, so here's an entry. "I met Jake at the Weinstein Oscar party. We were both wearing dress shoes and standing four inches away from him. I was looking him in the eye. I had no need to even slightly angle my eyes upwards. I'm five foot eight inches and Jake was an inch taller than me, period. He has a pretty tall cranium which gave him the extra inch over me. So there's firsthand accounts and then there's people who watch him on TV. Just saw Jake on Jimmy Fallon. He was an inch and a half shorter than him in the scene where they're dancing about a hedgehog doing karate. Funny skit, but it proves to me Jake is five foot ten and a half at the most. They both were wearing the same Air Force One slash Converse shoes for the skit. It showed the whole body. Jake is six foot. This entry needs to be changed. So that's a guy. This is very common on celebheights.com. If you see Jake or any celebrity standing beside a celebrity of known height, then you just extrapolate based on that. It's never like, "Oh, I have a photo of Jake Gyllenhaal standing beside three yardsticks, you know, with his back to the wall." And so, for instance, there's an infamous picture of Jake and that's referred to a number of times here. Because exhibit's height, I think, has been nailed down. It's been nailed down how? Exhibit is actually the moderator of celebheights. It's exhibit's website. Address used to be mindstream.com/user/exhibit. But yeah, there's all kinds of celebrities on the site, like anyone from, you know, Danny DeVito to Liam Neeson. I need to use two height extremes, you know. Danny DeVito would be a good comparison. You could probably measure Jake's height in DeVito's. I was standing beside him in an Oscar party. Celebheights homepage specifies that all stats are barefoot estimates, as opposed to running shoe estimates or pajamas with feet estimates or the pair of socks that everyone from your office always says the same thing about, "Oh, aren't those fun?" when you wear them on casual Fridays, estimates. Celebheights was interested in facts, not frivolity. Definitely not a fun sock crowd. So here's an entry. I have met him. We were very close in height, no more than .75 in difference. I believe his six foot claim, he might measure 5'11.75 at 7 p.m. His absolute lowest will be my height, 5'11.25. But nothing suggested he was really under 6 feet, which is unusual because this guy just said that he's under 6 feet. Or another guy writes, "I see a 5'11 max morning height guy in those pictures." So this is something that I had never heard of before. The term is "max morning height," which is that people are tallest in the morning. And then as the day goes by, and this is true for myself, like, the day goes by, you slump more and more, you're getting more and more tired, you're getting beaten down by the world. And so a lot of people talk about max morning height. The first time I read that, I was like, "This guy must be a doctor." I've never heard of this concept, but as soon as I heard it, I was like, "That makes sense to me." Then there's the ethnographic take on the question. This guy writes, "He doesn't look like a typical 6 foot guy with long arms and a long neck. His body is like a Peruvian guy, large oblong head, short neck. At least he's maybe around 5'11. I don't think he is 6 foot. I should see him shaving." I should see him shaving. I should see him denuded of hair. You know, like a lizard. But he doesn't say, "If only we could see him shaving." No, I. None of you other people should see him shaving. I have my own test, but it requires Jake Tullinall to be fully shaven. I should see him shaving. Because it's not as emphatic as, "I must see him shaving." It's like, "Yeah, I really should eat more fiber." One commenter points out that Jake was supposed to play the Joker. And so mystery solved. Since as everyone knows, the Joker is 6 foot 3. That commenter is immediately attacked by other commenters, as the Joker's height is too contested. Of course, Jake never did play the Joker, perhaps because of this very controversy. Instead, he went on to play the role of army pilot Coulter Stevens in Source Code, who has sent back in time in 8-minute intervals to try and prevent a bomber from blowing up Chicago. Although at the end of the movie, it's revealed, he's actually just a blown-up torso, which makes calculating his height even that much more difficult, because he doesn't have legs. How important is it to you to get to the bottom of this? Well, I've invested more time in this than most of my peer group, I think. Structurally, it's almost analogous to Source Code, in that Jake is returning again and again to the scene of a crime to try to solve a mystery over and over again with incremental additions of information. And I am having my own mystery, where I'm returning again and again to CelebHeights.com, with each visit trying to gain a little more information about the height of Jake Jones. It kind of messes with your mind after a while. 'Cause one guy here, one maniac on this board is like, "Huh, this is surprising, I always thought he was 6'5". I loved you and Prince of Bersha, Jake, that's in here somewhere. It's like, "I'm pretty sure Jake Jones is not 6'5", 'cause if you're 6'5, like everybody, there's no debate about whether you're 5'11.75, or like if you're a weak 6'5. Like, 6'5 kind of stands out. Does he ever drop, what is the lowest that they go with him? This goes from 5'9 to somebody saying he's 6'5. That's a huge, that's 8 inches. You know, even accounting for max morning height and shrinking over the course of the day, you're not going to lose 8 inches in one day. So we're working with an 8 inch spread here. Right. I have a feeling he's not 6 foot. I have a feeling that if he was 6 foot, he would have said, "I'm happily 6'1". I have a feeling he's 5'11.5. Here's what I think I should do for you. What if I found out how tall Jake was once and for all? Well, that's good. I think you'd have a better chance of doing it than I would. So what is the bare minimum you will settle for? I would settle for word from Jake himself. And if he's like, "It's like I wrote on my website. I'm happily 6'12. I'm happy with it. I'm right in the middle of it. Boom, 6 foot. I'm just lounging right here at 6 foot." He seems like an honest guy. I would accept that. I would take him at his word. Okay. So word from the man himself. Okay. I can do it. I can do it. All right. And also I would like to see him shave it. I promised David I'd send word once I had any news and set off on my search. I decided to begin where this whole method started. The internet. It felt like using a brick to clean up a spill. I posted a call on Twitter for anyone who saw Jake to let me know. I didn't expect anything to come of it. But almost immediately, the tweet started pouring in. Jake was in New York, like me. One person had seen him in her spin class. Someone else said it was just the two of them in her coffee shop the other morning. She reached for the sugar, and there he was. Another girl was ordering a burger when Jake walked by outside. She was so startled that she threw the burger away. Just chucked it in midair. Not to sound creepy, but by the end of the week, I had a pretty good idea of his entire schedule. I knew where he bought his shirts, where he unwound with a beer. I knew which shifts his brother-in-law and sometimes co-star, Peter Sarsgard, worked at the food co-op. But even so, I was always one step behind. The closest and most frustrating call came from my friend Dan. It's very sad, actually. I had no idea that you were doing this Jake Gyllenhaal story. It was a leisurely Saturday afternoon. Dan had just finished up brunch and was browsing at a store that I went to all the time, and which was no more than ten minutes by train, five minutes by mad dash, from my house. Jake Gyllenhaal was standing out on the sidewalk and talking to a group of maybe four or five women, and he was just standing there for, I mean, he was there in my presence for 30 or 40 minutes. So it's definitely conceivable that if you had called me, I could have gotten there in time to have measured him. There was plenty of time for you to get on the subway, come over. Jake Gyllenhaal was becoming my celebrity Moriarty, or to put it in terms that my peer group would understand, my snuffle-up-a-guess. And now, let's take a short break. ♪♪ And we're back. Hi. My friend Jeb is a film producer. We met on the top of a mountain in Utah, but that's a story for another time. Jeb was actually one of the producers of Source Code. I called him up, and he said he was going to see Jake in a week if they were going out to dinner. Did I want him to ask Jake if he would tell me how tall he is? I tried to play it off all casual-like. I told Jeb only if it comes up naturally in conversation. The dinner happened, and then Jeb called me, and then I called David to relay the findings. Hey. So you're calling to report on your findings? Yeah. I'm excited. I did find Jake Gyllenhaal. Where is he? He knows you're looking for him. Good. My name is out on the street. That's good. But he won't tell you how tall he is. Jake had been intrigued, but wouldn't give a number. Did he say why? He's trying to lay low. What does that mean? He won't stand up. He's just lying down. I had failed at the very moment when success seemed most guaranteed. No matter which way I looked at it, no matter how hard I thought about it, I simply couldn't go higher than Jake Gyllenhaal to get to Jake Gyllenhaal. And now that I had set this thing in motion, I didn't know how to make it stop. Twitter was giving CelebHeights.com a real run for its money when it came to Jake Gyllenhaal minutia. People were now not only giving me reports about where he was, but also where he wasn't. He's not here putting my very cranky baby to sleep. Sick in bed today. He's not making reassuring jokes while dabbing my forehead with a cool washcloth. I checked in the cubicle next to me. Alas, no Jake. Just Susan from Accounting, who's dreamy in her own right, but not the same. He's not on this bench in Battery Park, watching the harbor, sun on his face, the wind in the leaves. All around me was Jake Gyllenhaal. The earth was comprised of surfaces where he had either just been or could one day be. The molecules in the air were in a perpetual state of arranging and rearranging themselves around his presence or absence. Trying to determine his true height was like asking, "How wide is the sky? How deep is the sea?" It occurred to me that perhaps Jake Gyllenhaal himself didn't know how tall he was. Seasons passed. Winter came. Planets rotated. Stars died. Enumerable gallons of ice cream were consumed. Countless spoons were bent. Babies learned how to crawl. Teenagers learned how to kiss. Podcasts went from being popular in a niche way to a mainstream way. But still, older people could not figure out how to listen to them on their phones. Heavy televisions were replaced by thin televisions. The outdated models were put out on the street, picked up by couples in love, and then, after some time had passed, put back out on the street. It might be helpful to imagine a wall calendar for this part, with the pages dropping off one after another after another after another. The time just falling away until. [music] How impressed are you that I've stayed on the case? Well, I have to say, as an investigator, you are tenacious, and I really admire that. I mean, I assume you're here today to resolve the case, that we are going to close this case. We're going to move it from red to black. I don't know. Maybe this is just your update where it's like, I have no idea who Jake Gyllenhaal is, or how to measure human height. Just want to let you know I'm still plugging away. But if you are here to bring closure to this, I'm excited because this has been a long time coming. Do you remember who you saw Source Code with? I saw it by myself. Yeah. I think I saw it at the Fishkill Regal Cinemas, which is just like the local multiplex. And I think it was before they redid their floors, because they have an insanely large and empty lobby area, and they put in very brightly patterned industrial tile. And I think it was before that. So, like, in the markers of your life, it's like post-divorce, pre-floor change of that cinema? Something like that. Post-divorce, pre-floor change, as are so many of our precious moments in this life. So recently, my friend Sloan texted me, and she said, "Jake Gyllenhaal's in a restaurant. He's having dinner with his mom. Should I go ask his height?" I texted Sloan back, "Yes." Then I remembered how Jake Gyllenhaal had reacted the last time I'd sent someone on a similar mission. Had history taught me nothing, clearly Jake Gyllenhaal hated being asked how tall he was while in a restaurant. I got nervous that Sloan's badgering would scare him off, and then I'd never solve the case. I wrote another text saying, "No, no, abort, abort, abort." And then Sloan's phone died, so she didn't get that message. She only got the "yes." Oh my gosh. Hello? How are you? What? What? What happened? I don't even know where to begin. As soon as she was out of the restaurant, Sloan found a place to charge her phone and called me with her update. And so you just have to understand the layout of the restaurant is such that there is just one table for two that is sort of like on an island on the inside, and the rest are sort of family-style tables sort of circling it. And so I was sitting at that middle table with my friend Chris, which means that everything that I'm about to tell you is like in an ampere. Mm-hmm. Sloan and her friend deliberated for an hour about whether she should approach Jake. Chris kept turning around and thinking he was being very slick. I'm like, "You're not being slick." Before finally landing on, well, hell, here goes nothing. Just as I sort of kept the balls to do it, some, you know, sort of beanpole, blond, chickadee approaches their table and starts talking to them. And I'm like, "Oh my God." I did not see that coming. Oh my God. Someone's going to ask him how Tally is first. Finally, I was like, "That's it. I have to do it." Tally has been looking for this information for a really long time. I'm going to go ask him. That's it. I'm going to go ask him. And so I walked over to him and said, "I'm so sorry." Are you serious? Yes. You're a field agent. Yes. What really went over to him? Yes. Oh my God. What did I put in motion? I said, "You know, I'm sorry. I don't mean to interrupt. I know you're eating dinner with your family." And they looked at me exactly how I thought they would, which was like, you know, slightly deer caught in the headlights. And then I said, "I know this is totally strange, but..." I have to ask, how tall are you? And Jake Gyllenhaal said, "Why does everyone want to know this?" That was so amazing. Oh man. Oh my gosh. Oh. And he started him off. He was like, "I can't say that he wouldn't." He was really hedging about it. And then his mother looked at me and she holed up six fingers. Happily? I think happily. He nodded when she said six feet. Did he confirm? No, he did not confirm. He did not confirm. And I'm like, "So you're six feet tall." And he goes, "I'm six-eight." And I'm like, "Oh, come on." Yeah. See, a guy like that is savvy. He knows he has all the leverage, right? Because not only is he a famous Hollywood movie star, he's a famous Hollywood movie star and the only person who knows how tall he is. And that's what everyone wants to know. And how do you think he is? I think he's five-nine. No, you don't. No, Jake. I don't know. I stood up next to him. The problem is I was wearing a slight heel. Yeah, right. It's hard to say. Anyway, I should go into this thing. Okay, okay. I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming. Oh, I got to go. Okay, bye. Bye. What did you think I was going to come here and tell you? My fantasy would have been for Jake Gyllenhaal and his state of true transparency and honesty and oneness with the universe to just announce his height with the understanding that he wouldn't be judged for it and it would have no effect on his professional personal prospects, but it would just be almost a statement of principle vis-a-vis this idea of the unknowability of certain things and the age of information. And then it does seem like for so many things we still do need to go to the source, right? Because so many ways of finding out the objective truth of this information would have been unethical. We can't go to his doctor and find out. That's not the type of people we are, unless that's what you did in which case that is the type of people we are. I wanted... You wanted the man himself. Did, well, now I'm excited. Do I have to ask? I mean, did we get to the man himself? Hope you're not disappointed, but the answer is yes. Jake Gyllenhaal told me how tall he was. Really? Starly? Yeah. How are you? Fine, how are you? I'm well. So I'm going to connect you to Jake. Oh, great. Amazing. Thank you so, so much. Starly, can we call you back in like four minutes? Yep. Okay, thank you. Hi, Starly. Hi, Jake. Hey, how you doing? At last we meet. Should I ask you the question? Sure. You sure? I mean, I think so. You're so nervous about being asked a question that I'm positive you already know what it is. No, I'm not nervous about it at all. I'm worried for you. I do fear that ultimately the answer will be totally unsatisfactory, you know? I mean, I don't want to devastate you with this. Right, or destroy my career. You may be doing that already. That I have nothing to do with. I'm trying really hard to do it then. Oh, good. I've been very disciplined about it. One thing I have learned when you try and destroy your career, it only brings wonderful things. Don't ever use that advice. That's the worst piece of advice anyone's ever given. But my hint to you, I will say that I'm taller than my sister. Okay. She's three years older than me, so she had like a good head start, but I caught up and got taller. What age did you surpass her then? I would say like when I hit like 16, 17, I was taller than my sister. But as any younger sibling would tell you, like they always sort of feel taller than you. It really is about what we project onto other people. There are days where I'm sure I seem taller than I am. And there are days where you wake up and you're just like, oh man, it's cold out or something's going on in your life. And you're shorter, I think. I know what you're saying because I think I am taller than I am. How tall are you? Well. Oh, that's not therapy. No, that's totally, I'm sorry. Yeah, who's interviewing who here, right? Okay, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't think I would apologize during this interview. Oh, I did. I'm not doing it again. I just want you to know. Okay, we'll see about that. I'm going to ask you the question. Are you ready for it? How could anybody be ready for this question? This is like one of those things. There's no right time. It's like having a baby. You just do it. You know, then you figure it out. And then it grows up to some undetermined height. Totally relative height. Yeah, it changes depending on morning and midday. Or how you feel about yourself. Wait, just because I laugh doesn't mean that I think it's healthy. To me, it's less about the answer to the question and more about the quest. I feel a little uncomfortable with you calling it a quest. [Laughs] I'm surprised at myself that I've agreed to do this. But like you, I am inquisitive. And let me just say this. I'm not a scientist. Whoa, wait a minute. Let me just explain. Speaking of shrinking. Innerspace? Did you ever see that movie? Yes, I've seen Innerspace. Great film. Okay, well, this is the irony of Innerspace. Dennis Quaid is tiny, teeny, small shrunken in Innerspace. But in reality is taller than Martin Short, his co-star in that film, who is bigger than him in the film, but in reality happens to be smaller than Dennis Quaid. That is true. So the answer is yes. You're ready? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, I'm ready. Of course I'm ready. Of course. Okay. Should I even answer this question? I see no downside to answering it. Can you tell me about the upside of this? Closure. Is it time for me to ask you the question? I feel like once I answer this question, that'll be it. There will be no more mystery in your mind, because I will have told you what is true, right? The mystery will be solved. I just want you to take a moment before we cross over to the other side. And I want you to ask yourself, are you willing and ready to walk into reality? Because this is the end of the journey. No more of the fantasies that you've been living under and all the things you've been trying to search for. This is where the rubber meets the road. This is the moment for you. Are you ready? Yes. How tall are you? I am. So what did he say? How tall? You know what, let's do this right. Starly, it's been a long time coming. How tall is Jake Schellenhal? I am actually five foot eleven and one and one half of an inch. That's how tall I am. Five, eleven and a half. That's the best possible answer. Five, eleven and a half, that's amazing. That's the best possible answer. Because it's like, it would have been so easy for him to say, "Yeah, I'm happily six feet." I had to get a physical the other day and they said, "How tall are you?" I just said, "Six-two." But in my mind, I was thinking, "Actually, I'm six-two and a half." I'm brushing up against six-three. But how am I a forty-two year old man going to say, "I'm six feet two and a half inches." Do you know what I mean? Because once you've passed six-two, it's like it's all the same. If you're six-three or six-sixteen. So I admire that in the spirit of our inquiry, which was to get some hard facts, that Jake Gyllenhaal gave us that half inch of the significant digit. Case closed. Case closed. I love it. Should I tell you my real height? Absolutely. Doesn't that seem fair? Yes, yes. I always say I'm five feet, but I think I'm four-eleven. Yeah, see, that's what we're talking about right there. Doesn't it feel so much better to say, "Oh, I'm five feet," as opposed to like, "No, I'm actually four-eleven." No, because you're tall. My thing's very understandable. What are you talking about? Say tell that to LeBron James. You know what I mean? It's like, it's all relative. I'm tall. You're tall to Dennis Quaid in Interspace. To Dennis Quaid in Interspace, exactly. Or Martin Short in general. Does some of this or all of this just really have to do with you and how tall you think you are? It really didn't until the conversation. Yeah, but that's kind of great. That's kind of great. Because I've been sitting here, you know, let's be honest, I've been sitting here thinking, "I've never met her. I've never even seen her." You could have been like seven-foot-six. Right. You could just be like one of the tallest women in the world. In fact, talking to you on the phone, you seem like it. See, that's what I'm saying. It's a projection, right? That's what I was saying. You're stealing my thing. Maybe we can all go out to dinner. And then you can officially measure me and you can make sure. Okay, I mean. Or not. No, never mind. Forget about it. My promise was not that that was a bad idea. No, never mind. I didn't want to anyway. Actually have it untouched. He wants to go to dinner with all of us. You, me, him, and Sloane. That will be an amazing photo. And we'll line up according to height. Oh, damn it. That means I'm on the end. What is Jake Gyllenhaal's favorite restaurant? Are you assigning me a new mystery? Exactly. Jake, my inquiry has only just begun. Expect my agents in every grocery store, every car wash, every church service, every book reading, every awards gala. We will understand you, Mr. Gyllenhaal. Just kidding. Mystery shows produced by Alex Bloomberg, Melinda Shopsen, Eric Menel, and me. Producing help for this episode from Chris Neary and Fia Benin. Eli Horowitz is contributing editor. Thanks also to Matt Lieber. Original score for this episode by White Dove. Additional original scoring by Emmy the Great and Devin Deer. Closing song by Emmy the Great. Opening song by Sparks. Arthur Jones made our logo. Miss You, pal. Come visit. Thank you, Ilna Baker, Mark Sykes, Jen Snow, and Sarah Zebrack. Now, I don't want you guys to get all nervous, but there won't be a new episode of Mystery Show next week. We're taking a little break until mid-July. But in the meantime, you can tweet at us, and at me, all you want. And now I have a confession. I'm slightly worried that I gave you an unsolvable clue last week. I thought it was real, but now I'm thinking it was maybe only CelebHeights.com real. All I know for sure is that no one guessed Jake Gyllenhaal. So it's sort of like, you all guessed Jake Gyllenhaal. That makes sense, right? Here's the clue for the next episode. Burrow president. [music playing] I forgot about Max Morningheight. Oh, my God, I forgot about Max Morningheight. God. That's such a good name for a detective. That's what I should be doing with my life, is writing the Max Morningheight series. Jake Gyllenhaal is going to play Max Morningheight, detective at large. Jake, I'm putting you on notice right now. You understand my ability to control your perception of reality and your social circumstances, Jake? This is our next project.