An Exercise in Thinking Peculiarly
“There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.“
- Pablo Picasso
Watching Horrible Bosses for the third time was a revelation. A shifting in my understanding of the world occurred which can not be unoccured.
As Motherfucker Jones was up to his old tricks, and as the gang got up to progressively less plausible hijinx, I realized, not only is Horrible Bosses a buddy-buddy-buddy comedy, it’s also about a group of guys hanging out in a car.
“Earth shifting”, I can hear you think.
“Monumental breakthrough in human understanding”, murmurs another.
“Realizing Horrible Bosses has several scenes that take place in a car is certainly…a thing”, writes a future academic.
And while I haven’t watched it a fourth time to clock exactly how many murders are planned in the two-in-the-front, one-in-the-back formation the movie pivots around, my larger takeaway was thinking about the structure behind the art I was watching, and then, underneath the world I was walking through.
“After I saw things differently once, I started to see things more differently, more often”
- Shakespeare*
David Foster Wallace, of course
As David Foster Wallace told graduates of Kenyon College in 2005, about the dreariness they would have to dredge themselves through as adult, he used the example of wanting to go home after work but realizing you have no food at home and have to go grocery shopping,
frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider.
*Footnote 1: Shakespeare Apollo, a man I met on a bus once**
Some Things That Can Be Thought of Somewhat Differently
I share these perspectives mostly because they are fun to think about and write down, but also, that they might inspire others, or even myself again, to think about things a little differently, to find more choices to chose from in the grocery store check out line.
1. McDonald’s Isn’t a Fast Food Company
As Ryan from The Office tells Batman from the 80s, McDonald’s is only going to expand at any kind of lucrative rate if it buys real estate to lease to its franchisees, rather than the companies then-policy of having the franchisee lease the land and build the McDonald’s building.
In the words of 2016’s excellent, The Founder, McDonald’s didn’t become the McDonald’s America now knows it as, until Roy Kroc (does a bunch of somewhat unethical, somewhat necessary shit and) realizes he’s in the real estate business.
McDonald’s is a real estate company.
2. Similarly, Tanning Bed Companies Are Mostly Not Tanning Bed Companies
The employees of a tanning salon are primarily cleaning the tanning beds and cleaning the things that clean the tanning beds (small, white towels).
They are then, perhaps more aptly described as a cleaning service that sometimes pitches customers monthly tanning packages.
Tanning bed companies are mostly cleaning companies.
3. YouTube isn’t YouTube because it’s a video hosting website
Sure, YouTube definitely hosts videos which demand storage space, cyber security teams, and an efficient, impregnable network.
But that’s what any video hosting service would have to do.
That doesn’t explain why YouTube has had next to no real competition since it’s inception.
As Reply All discovered, YouTube’s success lives and dies with it’s video recommendations.
YouTube wants you stay on its site as long as possible. All websites, ostenisbly, do.
READ MORE ABOUT HOW WEDDINGS ARE THE SHARK SITCOMS JUST CAN’T HELP BUT JUMP.
What keeps users on YouTube?
It’s not the video you’re watching right now, but the next video.
As Reply All’s incredible – and devastatingly painful – investigation found, the YouTube recommendation algorithm went from a Gangnam Style problem, to a White Nationalist problem, to it’s current state, which I have to say, is pretty successful in suggesting videos where actors, writers, and comedians interview each other or, talk about a certain aspect of their career.
I am a sucker for these videos and YouTube’s video recommendation algorithm knows it.
YouTube is YouTube because it’s a video recommendation service.
4. North By Northwest isn’t just a slow-paced Hitchcock film
It’s also, very much a movie about a man traveling America via different forms of transit, trying not to fall in love with a woman he meets on a train.
Hitchcock invented the term “MacGuffin”: an object or device in a movie or a book that serves merely as a trigger for the plot.
Or as the Hitchcock Wiki adds, a MacGuffin is a goal of the protagonist or antagonist in the film, “often with little or no narrative explanation as to why [the goal] is considered so desirable”.
The Coen Bros. do away with all pretense in Fargo, having William H. Macy play a desperate man who effectively kidnaps his wife to get the ransom money from his father-in-law. At no point in the film do we find out what Macy needs the ransom money for.
The “advertising executive goes on the run after being mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies” MacGuffin in North by Northwest can only work if we care about the guy, and gal, who are on the run.
And while we’re falling in love and running from spies, let’s throw in cross country travel, a reality that is only recently becoming affordable to many Americans, due to Eisenhower’s signing of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, when North by Northwest is released in 1959.
You may recognize some of the highways created in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 as “all of the major highways in America”, pictured here:
I think most Americans would be surprised to hear that the major highways we take for granted didn’t exist, or even start to exist, until 1956.
Even the advertising for the movie cued in on this cross-country travel motif.
The poster in this “Alfred Hitchock Introduces North by Northwest” promo video highlights the travel that occurs in the movie, almost exclusively.
Not only that, its design mimics the cover of a promotional tourism brochure.
And in fact, this entire trailer is treated like a pitch from a twisted travel agent, starting with, “have you planned your vacation yet?”
The film visits The United Nations and Mount Rushmore. Cary Grant meets a femme fatale on a train who sets him up to take a bus to a field where he avoids getting hit by a crop duster plane, only to be hit by a tank truck.
It’s a 1950’s Planes, Trains, and Automobiles without the humor. In other words, it’s a 1950’s Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.
This poster plays-up the Mount Rushmoreness of it all.
North by Northwest isn’t solely an overrated film from a master filmmaker.
North by Northwest is also the first travel vlog of America.
5. Tee K.O. isn’t just an online party game where you create ridiculous t-shirts
If quarantine has taught me one thing, and one thing only, it hasn’t been any large philosophical or moral lesson, it’s how fun the online party game Tee K.O. is.
Please don’t be off-put by my gag-inducing use of the phrase “online party game”, Tee K.O. is absolutely worth your time. Especially since you have so much of it on your hands right now.
In Tee K.O., developed by Jackbox Games, you drink whiskey gingers, draw t-shirts, and write phrases.
The result of all this drawing and writing is ridiculous drawings paired with ridiculous phrases creating hilarious tee-shirts which you can vote on and laugh at with your friends.
And then, and this is an important step, as crucial as the drinking of the whiskey gingers, you can buy them.
I bought this one:
Tee K.O. isn’t just some online party game, it’s also a Universe Creator.
For real, maybe.
In the opening of This American Life‘s 691st episode titled “Gardens of Branching Paths” Ira Glass talks to David Kastenbaum about an app called Universe Splitter.
Ira Glass: OK, so what does this Universe Splitter do?
David Kestenbaum: It lets you do both. Like, it creates a duplicate of this universe so that in one you get to grow the beard, and in the other you shave it off.
Ira Glass: Wait, that’s what we’re going to do?
David Kestenbaum: Yeah.
Ira Glass: For pretend or for real?
David Kestenbaum: No, no, for real, maybe. This is a thing. It’s called the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. And there are a lot of really smart physicists who think this is probably what’s happening.
And while this Quantum Magazine article, probably one of many, picks apart all the problems with this theory it also sums it up nicely.
It is the most extraordinary, alluring and thought-provoking of all the ways in which quantum mechanics has been interpreted. In its most familiar guise, the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) suggests that we live in a near-infinity of universes, all superimposed in the same physical space but mutually isolated and evolving independently. In many of these universes there exist replicas of you and me, all but indistinguishable yet leading other lives.
So just as David Kestenbaum explains to Ira Glass how the Universe Splitter app creates two new realities (well one, if you include the one we already exist in) based on which direction a photon goes after being hit with light…
…(Universe Splitter) sends a signal to a fancy piece of scientific equipment at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. And the equipment these days can be tiny, like a little box you can hold in your hand. And it does the following. It takes a single particle of light, a photon, it sends it at a kind of mirror that can make the photon either go left or right. You can think of it that way...
…Tee K.O.‘s interactive, real time interface sends signals from your fingers, and the fingers of all your friends (easily the weirdest phrase I’ve written on this blog to date), and turns them into votes on which Phrase + Picture combo makes the funniest t-shirt.
Not only does one round of Tee K.O. create universes where potential shirts did and didn’t get created, in-game, for people to laugh at, you as a player are then able to actually create a universe (this one) where your shirt exists because you can buy these insane creations, demand they be printed, and the process of mailing them started, like a 21st century mad king, in less than one whiskey ginger.
The fact that it’s even possible to draw things, write things, combine the things you’ve drawn and written, laugh at those combinations, vote on those combinations, and then have those combinations made into a shirt, makes the Multi-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, seem not that insane.
As Philip Ball writes, “the MWI illustrates just how peculiarly quantum theory forces us to think” and I find that very fitting for the exercise I’m undertaking here: practicing thinking peculiarly.
6. Russia isn’t just a country where corruption and poverty is so bad everyone has to get dash-cams to prevent insurance fraud
…it’s also a magical land that might have brought us more meteors on film than any other place, in any other time, in human history.
Again, it’s about choosing what to think and how to think about it.
7. 1917 isn’t just an acheivement in filmmaking for it’s illusion of a single tracking shot throughout the film
Ok, this is like the 4th movie reference on this list, but I cannot get over 1917.
To keep it quick: what all movies do metaphorically, 1917 does literally.
Every scene in a script has to get you to the next scene in that script, in a plausible, entertaining, and if you’re lucky, resonating way.
Quick Aside for Set Pieces
A film of any measure will usually have multiple set pieces.
In film production, a set piece is a scene or sequence of scenes whose execution requires complex logistical planning and considerable expenditure of money. The term is often also used more broadly to describe a sequence in which the filmmaker’s elaborate planning is considered to allow for the maximum payoff for the audience, such as a thrilling action sequence or awe-inspiring science fiction sequence
Think of the entrance-through-the-kitchen shot in Goodfellas or the entire Jack Rabbit Slim’s sequence, and set, in Pulp Fiction.
Back To The Main Plot
The difference between 1917 and Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, and every modern movie besides maybe Linklater’s Before Trilogy or Van Zandt’s Death Trilogy, is that most movies cut between scenes.
So to connect one scene to another, one set piece to another, films rely on story, and the audience’s century-plus experience with film narrative, to fill in the blank spaces between scenes.
While we see Mia Wallace snort heroin, and then we see Vincent Vega driving her lifeless body in his convertible, we can infer that in the interim, in the space between the jump cuts, Vega carried Wallace to his car, put her in it, and started driving.
1917 moves from one major set piece to another (a farm house on a hill to a troop, hunkered down in a forest) within minutes and rather than rely (mostly) on cuts and narrative jumps, it does so by walking.
The final impression is that by walking about 500 feet we enter a completely different world.
And the MacGuffin pushing us forward, which in most movies is an idea, or an object like a golden-light emanating suitcase, is, in 1917, a literal walk, one that happens to be across enemy lines during World War I.
1917 isn’t just an amazing technological feat of film making, it is the physical manifestation of all stories told on film.
8. List blogs are not just interesting ways to group seemingly disparate artifacts into niche categories to make it’s creators feel smart and special
They are also ways to make your obsessive personality seem like a quirky, productive blogging hobby.
**Footnote 2: not a factual statement.