One.
My ex knew a woman with a podcast. She was fascinated by this podcast. It was a mental health podcast—a guide to dealing with crippling mental health issues, and to finding happiness and peace. It had exactly two followers: me and my ex, each out of morbid curiosity. And it had no content.
Oh, it had episodes, and quite a few of them: fifteen minutes or so long, and organized by seeming subject. And each episode sounded like it was about something: it had an intro, an explanation of the topic, a conclusion. But it was only the sound of something, an echo of substance, a shadow of a shape.
Why start a podcast? So you can be heard. So you can be known, and known as someone who has something to say.
Why start a podcast? For the prestige, for the authority, for the success: the fame, the fortune, the confirmation that you're really something, really someone, really there.
If you want to define the cultural malaise of our age, start here: our standards for quality are dropping even as the means with which to feign quality are rising. A decade and a half ago, I saw it in Silicon Valley: people launching slick, glossy blogs and slick, glossy startups, so they could be known as having blogged, so they could be known as having founded startups, all because this was the thing to do. Some of these people wound up massively rich: witness Elizabeth Holmes, who figured out that investors were so stupid that she could dress like Steve Jobs and drop her voice an octave and make out like a bandit. Others wound up, well, strangely lonely, parroting a life that wasn't theirs, for no purpose other than that they could think of no greater thing to be than a Success.
There are many iterations of this across our culture. It explains the world of TikTok influencers, formerly Instagram influencers, even more formerly MySpace influencers, in which projecting a glossy image of yourself is enough to get suckers to make you millions. (Harper's has a FANTASTIC article on this subculture, by the way.) It explains the phenomenon of right-wing media, which started with Fox News's obsession with graphics and sex in lieu of substance, evolved into the Tea Party and Breitbart, and keeps evolving, now to the point of lurid conspiracy theories about pedophiles and election-stealing. And it explains a great deal of cultural criticism and its decline, which perhaps started with Pitchfork in the late 90s, evolved into the episode-by-episode TV review phenomenon, and now exists as a series of endless 2-hour-long YouTube videos about various pop ephemera, or the philosophical conviction that pop music, hit shows, and Minecraft are the ne plus ultra of what "the arts" can provide us.
This stuff is like soda. The more of it consume, the more we're convinced that our bloating is actually nourishment, and the less we need to convince ourselves we're fulfilled. And politics declines to the point of farce, finance and business increasingly become exist somewhere between farce and scam—RIP NFTs, 2021-2021—and our ideas about culture, intellectualism, and the arts more and more closely resemble narcissism. (We do not have to touch upon Kanye West or the "Substack phenomenon" today, but I feel the need to include them here just the same.) And the more desolate this kind of culture becomes, the more fertile it gets for those who would seek to have fun at its expense.
Two.
On Cinema at the Cinema is a movie review show. At the time of this writing, it is ten years old. It is, in its quiet way, massively influential—its two reviewers, for example, were given featured spots in several Marvel movies, whose directors are obsessed with it. It spawned a spin-off action series, which ran for six seasons and even received an animated pilot. It's hard to accurately calculate how successful it's been, but its combined episodes—the lengths of which combined easily total 50+ hours of content, possibly double that—easily have over 50 million views, and that's seriously low-balling it.
It is also—and this is very important—terrible.
The host knows next-to-nothing about movies. It's likely he doesn't even watch them. His most frequent guest (so frequent that you can more-or-less call him a co-host, except the host hates that) mostly cares about the lengths of films, though he also insisted for three years running that each Hobbit movie was likely to win Best Picture at the Oscars. The central technical marvel of the show is that its reviewers have, over ten years, never failed to discover brand-new ways of saying nothing. The podcaster my ex was obsessed with wishes she had the fortitude of these two men, though she likely envies their audience and influence as well.
Then there's the body count.
Off the top of my head, I can think of at least 24 deaths associated with the show, most prominently the 20 teenagers who died of overdoses at a music festival (and the man who provided those teens with the drugs that killed them, who then hung himself). Then there was the near-infanticide: the death of the host's son, which he reported on air, tears in his eyes, minutes before rating Brad Pitt/Angeline Jolie vehicle By The Sea five bags of popcorn out of a maximum of five bags.
Nero fiddled while Rome burned. These men create content.
Gregg Turkington, the aforementioned "special guest", has spoken before about his love of VHS tapes. On the show, his obsession bleeds through: he insists upon the purity of VHS as a medium, even going so far as to rig up a movie projector that can screen VHS copies of films large enough for theaters. In this interview, however, he talked instead about his fascination with these old, copious movies, some of them so unloved that they never made the crossover into DVD and then digital formats, sold for quarters at garage sales nationwide. At some point, these movies were giant studio productions: millions of dollars were spent making them, warehouses were devoted to filming them, literally hundreds of people slaved away for weeks and months on them. And then they just... ceased to be. They're one VHS tape in a sea of thousands, mediocre and unloved, the barest proof that once upon a time, we performed marvels of labor and engineering whose fruits, for all intents and purposes, dissolved into the sea.
On Cinema shows its perverse love for these vanished features, now and again. Gregg has an ongoing love for Oh God!, a not-unsuccessful film from 1977 that you almost certainly don't remember. One On Cinema Oscar Special—they perform one live every year, opposite the actual Oscars, for excruciating hours at a time—entirely revolved around Jaws 2, and had a set built out of copious Jaws 2 memorabilia, strange artifacts of a strange happening that we have no reason to remember. The show's most famous actor is Joe Estevez, the younger brother of Martin Sheen, almost entirely known for his performances in B movies and straight-to-video. The first time he appears on the show, host Tim Heidecker recites a list of every film Estevez had ever appeared in at the time; the recitation lasts an uninterrupted 4 minutes and 11 seconds. You will recognize almost none of the films mentioned.
Heidecker is less of a "film buff" and more of a "wannabe magnate". Remember that list I recounted, of all the aspects of our society that thrive on that quasi-authoritative substance-free bullshit? Tim wants it all: the right-wing media empire, the tech startups, the band, the movie-star fame, the political office, the alternative medicine, the financial expertise... if it exists and it has a spiritual void at its center, Heidecker wants a part of it. And he will almost certainly name it after himself in the process. (His six-season TV show was called Decker; his bands are called Dekkar and DKR; his holding company is called Hei. Borges has a line about setting out to map the world and realizing, near-death, that you have only drawn your own face; Tim drives that point home rather sharply.)
The differences in these two men's philosophies all culminate in one delightful outcome: these men detest each other. They may hate each other more than any man has ever hated any other man, across the long strange history of men hating other men. They know how to pack more contempt into a half-second pause than you will ever find yourself able to express, in a lifetime, towards any other living thing.
And it's important to note that nearly all of what happens between these two men, the loathings and the tragedies both, happens off-screen. These men appear before you, as they have for years and years, and this week one of them is covered in full-body burns and a body cast, only his eyes visible, the rest of him completely paralyzed... and he will convey, in darting glares, a belief that the man sitting next to him is responsible for all the troubles of the world, or at least all of his troubles (and he is the sort of man who thinks the world is nothing but a sum of all his troubles). But they will speak only bits of this out loud. It is far more pressing that they tell you what they think about the movies, namely Storks (5 bags/5 bags) and The Magnificent Seven (5 bags/5 bags).
It is also—and this is very important—terrible.
The host knows next-to-nothing about movies. It's likely he doesn't even watch them. His most frequent guest (so frequent that you can more-or-less call him a co-host, except the host hates that) mostly cares about the lengths of films, though he also insisted for three years running that each Hobbit movie was likely to win Best Picture at the Oscars. The central technical marvel of the show is that its reviewers have, over ten years, never failed to discover brand-new ways of saying nothing. The podcaster my ex was obsessed with wishes she had the fortitude of these two men, though she likely envies their audience and influence as well.
Then there's the body count.
Off the top of my head, I can think of at least 24 deaths associated with the show, most prominently the 20 teenagers who died of overdoses at a music festival (and the man who provided those teens with the drugs that killed them, who then hung himself). Then there was the near-infanticide: the death of the host's son, which he reported on air, tears in his eyes, minutes before rating Brad Pitt/Angeline Jolie vehicle By The Sea five bags of popcorn out of a maximum of five bags.
Nero fiddled while Rome burned. These men create content.
Gregg Turkington, the aforementioned "special guest", has spoken before about his love of VHS tapes. On the show, his obsession bleeds through: he insists upon the purity of VHS as a medium, even going so far as to rig up a movie projector that can screen VHS copies of films large enough for theaters. In this interview, however, he talked instead about his fascination with these old, copious movies, some of them so unloved that they never made the crossover into DVD and then digital formats, sold for quarters at garage sales nationwide. At some point, these movies were giant studio productions: millions of dollars were spent making them, warehouses were devoted to filming them, literally hundreds of people slaved away for weeks and months on them. And then they just... ceased to be. They're one VHS tape in a sea of thousands, mediocre and unloved, the barest proof that once upon a time, we performed marvels of labor and engineering whose fruits, for all intents and purposes, dissolved into the sea.
On Cinema shows its perverse love for these vanished features, now and again. Gregg has an ongoing love for Oh God!, a not-unsuccessful film from 1977 that you almost certainly don't remember. One On Cinema Oscar Special—they perform one live every year, opposite the actual Oscars, for excruciating hours at a time—entirely revolved around Jaws 2, and had a set built out of copious Jaws 2 memorabilia, strange artifacts of a strange happening that we have no reason to remember. The show's most famous actor is Joe Estevez, the younger brother of Martin Sheen, almost entirely known for his performances in B movies and straight-to-video. The first time he appears on the show, host Tim Heidecker recites a list of every film Estevez had ever appeared in at the time; the recitation lasts an uninterrupted 4 minutes and 11 seconds. You will recognize almost none of the films mentioned.
Heidecker is less of a "film buff" and more of a "wannabe magnate". Remember that list I recounted, of all the aspects of our society that thrive on that quasi-authoritative substance-free bullshit? Tim wants it all: the right-wing media empire, the tech startups, the band, the movie-star fame, the political office, the alternative medicine, the financial expertise... if it exists and it has a spiritual void at its center, Heidecker wants a part of it. And he will almost certainly name it after himself in the process. (His six-season TV show was called Decker; his bands are called Dekkar and DKR; his holding company is called Hei. Borges has a line about setting out to map the world and realizing, near-death, that you have only drawn your own face; Tim drives that point home rather sharply.)
The differences in these two men's philosophies all culminate in one delightful outcome: these men detest each other. They may hate each other more than any man has ever hated any other man, across the long strange history of men hating other men. They know how to pack more contempt into a half-second pause than you will ever find yourself able to express, in a lifetime, towards any other living thing.
And it's important to note that nearly all of what happens between these two men, the loathings and the tragedies both, happens off-screen. These men appear before you, as they have for years and years, and this week one of them is covered in full-body burns and a body cast, only his eyes visible, the rest of him completely paralyzed... and he will convey, in darting glares, a belief that the man sitting next to him is responsible for all the troubles of the world, or at least all of his troubles (and he is the sort of man who thinks the world is nothing but a sum of all his troubles). But they will speak only bits of this out loud. It is far more pressing that they tell you what they think about the movies, namely Storks (5 bags/5 bags) and The Magnificent Seven (5 bags/5 bags).
Three.
Each of the two men at the center of this show are best known for one other project apiece. In the case of Tim Heidecker, that's just one project among many: he's a bit of a Renaissance man and a workaholic, though the work that made him famous still stands alone. In Gregg Turkington's case, his one other project is similarly longform: he has worked on it for nearly thirty years, and for a long time was better known under his pseudonym than under his own real name. On Cinema at the Cinema marked his first real appearance as himself, though he's been quick to note that in a sense his work under his other name feels more like who he is than the work he does as, well, Gregg Turkington.
I've written about Heidecker before, and even touched upon On Cinema at the time. His other famous work, Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!, could not feel any more different on the surface: it's hyperactive and lurid, defined by vibrant colors and strange timbres and a dizzying variety of kinds of content, all roughly defined as the sorts of things you might find of public access television, the place where weirdoes go to dump their creative efforts.
If On Cinema is dry, even staid, then Awesome Show is wet and slimy, gross like the unsettling muck you find under rocks or pooling in the corners of old buildings. But one thing unites the two endeavors: both public access and YouTube are the democratic mediums that are open to us all, and therefore attract people driven by the need to make themselves known to a public—people who may not understand all the unspoken rules for sanitizing content and making themselves palatable, accessible, and unthinking. These are places where humanity, in its grim-and-delightful messiness, seeps in. At the same time, these are places which draw, by their nature, the kind of person who thinks you ought to know about them, less for any reason than because they would really like to be known.
Both projects are studies in a certain kind of sadness: a vulnerability that reveals itself in the desperate attempt to project confidence. The more they ape tones of authority and respectability, the more they try to push a manufactured image into the world, the easier it is to recognize the people beneath them, disturbed and confused and oftentimes alone. These are not always good people, though not all of them are bad people. They are trying their best, in a sense, though they do not always act in good faith. Either way, they are human—oftentimes achingly, uncomfortably so.
Gregg Turkington's other great project touches upon the same notes. For almost three decades, he has performed and released recordings as Neil Hamburger, a "working comedian" who never rises beyond the small local comedy clubs scattered across America due to his profound mediocrity, lack of talent, and—increasingly, over the years—offensiveness. His early works included albums like Left for Dead in Malaysia, which sees Hamburger bombing before a small audience that can't understand a word he's saying anyway. Later releases, like the iconic Hot February Night, see him perform before massive audiences that clearly despise him. Later still saw him performing strangely heartfelt, gorgeous big band covers of songs like "Homeward Bound", though always with that unpalatable voice. And then there's the film Entertainment, about as bleak and lonely a film about a comedian as you'll ever see.
This is not a man destined for greatness. Neither is it a man who ever wanted to be great. About all he ever wanted was a paycheck, and he got it, and let it lead him to strange lands. He is not quite a monster, but he has certainly morphed into something unseemly over the years, for all a spark of desperate humanity remains buried in him somewhere. (And it should be noted that many of Hamburger's performances are off-color and contain offensive material—if that doesn't sound like a good time to you, stick to the earlier stuff or give it a bye.)
As far as "content" goes, this stuff is about as antithetical to "spurious podcast" as it gets. It's anti-authority through-and-through: it doesn't just speak up against authority, but it goes out of its way to strip itself of any possible authority it might have garnered. Neil Hamburger's origins, Turkington has said, consisted of his printing records by hand, then slipping them into bins at random record stores across America. His name was not included. The point wasn't for him to be known: it was for someone to stumble across one of his albums at random, buy it out of curiosity, and then have a haunting experience with it—the sort of "haunting" in which you listen to something, have physical proof of its existence, yet cannot find a scrap of information about it anyway, or evidence that it could possibly be real.
The brilliant Jon Bois, in 2015, wrote an article about his love of accidental YouTube videos: automated content published without its creators' knowledge, cluttering the Internet with the purest kind of material, the sort that doesn't even realize it exists. This is less mysterious, perhaps, than Neil Hamburger's origins, but it achieves something similar: that experience of catching glimpses of something you cannot understand and cannot possibly have more of. This is not for you. It's not for anybody, not even the people who birthed it. And in a world where everything, increasingly, wants to be "for you", whether or not it's healthy for you to have it, there is something wholesome, even healing about that. We live in a world whose biggest companies operate by exploiting you psychologically, to trick you into consuming things on their platforms. There is evidence that consuming things like this makes us anxious and more paranoid and less happy; there is evidence that prolonged use of these platforms fosters political extremism to the point of violence. This is all for you. This is all for you. This is all for you. To come across what's not is like a breath of fresh air.
And that's the appeal, in a nutshell, of On Cinema: not just that it's a satire of the worst aspects of our culture, not just that it sublimely fails to give you the one thing it promises in its title, but that it was made by two people who are uniquely, definitively sick of "appealing to you." Plenty of people find both Heidecker and Turkington off-putting: both of their catalogues are full of foul and putrid things. Both make the things they want to make because, well, they want to; both lucked out and found ways to make a living producing stuff that more people fail to find value in than succeed. They are at this point highly-skilled veterans, and they have seemingly never had to change themselves to suit a focus group or a bad review. The On Cinema-adjacent documentary Mister America was filmed in three days and received mixed reactions from critics; I saw it in a packed theater of oddballs who laughed raucously at every little bit of it. They were gathered together because Mister America only aired in theaters for one night nationwide. On that night, a strange group of people came together and found people they never would have known existed otherwise.
Several weeks ago, I passed a man on the street wearing a shirt with a face of Tom Cruise Heidecker Jr., Heidecker's dearly-departed son, emblazoned on the front. I processed it too slowly to stop and acknowledge the man; I almost immediately regretted it. This is a strange place to find yourself; nobody who likes the show knows what it says about them that they like it, and plenty would not be able to tell you exactly why they like it, or why they laugh at the pieces that they laugh at, or why each and every one of them watched five hours of a murder trial that played out, well, exactly as slowly and drily as a courtroom hearing typically plays out. Yet they have found themselves here. In a world in which too much appeals too many, they have gathered here instead.
I've written about Heidecker before, and even touched upon On Cinema at the time. His other famous work, Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!, could not feel any more different on the surface: it's hyperactive and lurid, defined by vibrant colors and strange timbres and a dizzying variety of kinds of content, all roughly defined as the sorts of things you might find of public access television, the place where weirdoes go to dump their creative efforts.
If On Cinema is dry, even staid, then Awesome Show is wet and slimy, gross like the unsettling muck you find under rocks or pooling in the corners of old buildings. But one thing unites the two endeavors: both public access and YouTube are the democratic mediums that are open to us all, and therefore attract people driven by the need to make themselves known to a public—people who may not understand all the unspoken rules for sanitizing content and making themselves palatable, accessible, and unthinking. These are places where humanity, in its grim-and-delightful messiness, seeps in. At the same time, these are places which draw, by their nature, the kind of person who thinks you ought to know about them, less for any reason than because they would really like to be known.
Both projects are studies in a certain kind of sadness: a vulnerability that reveals itself in the desperate attempt to project confidence. The more they ape tones of authority and respectability, the more they try to push a manufactured image into the world, the easier it is to recognize the people beneath them, disturbed and confused and oftentimes alone. These are not always good people, though not all of them are bad people. They are trying their best, in a sense, though they do not always act in good faith. Either way, they are human—oftentimes achingly, uncomfortably so.
Gregg Turkington's other great project touches upon the same notes. For almost three decades, he has performed and released recordings as Neil Hamburger, a "working comedian" who never rises beyond the small local comedy clubs scattered across America due to his profound mediocrity, lack of talent, and—increasingly, over the years—offensiveness. His early works included albums like Left for Dead in Malaysia, which sees Hamburger bombing before a small audience that can't understand a word he's saying anyway. Later releases, like the iconic Hot February Night, see him perform before massive audiences that clearly despise him. Later still saw him performing strangely heartfelt, gorgeous big band covers of songs like "Homeward Bound", though always with that unpalatable voice. And then there's the film Entertainment, about as bleak and lonely a film about a comedian as you'll ever see.
This is not a man destined for greatness. Neither is it a man who ever wanted to be great. About all he ever wanted was a paycheck, and he got it, and let it lead him to strange lands. He is not quite a monster, but he has certainly morphed into something unseemly over the years, for all a spark of desperate humanity remains buried in him somewhere. (And it should be noted that many of Hamburger's performances are off-color and contain offensive material—if that doesn't sound like a good time to you, stick to the earlier stuff or give it a bye.)
As far as "content" goes, this stuff is about as antithetical to "spurious podcast" as it gets. It's anti-authority through-and-through: it doesn't just speak up against authority, but it goes out of its way to strip itself of any possible authority it might have garnered. Neil Hamburger's origins, Turkington has said, consisted of his printing records by hand, then slipping them into bins at random record stores across America. His name was not included. The point wasn't for him to be known: it was for someone to stumble across one of his albums at random, buy it out of curiosity, and then have a haunting experience with it—the sort of "haunting" in which you listen to something, have physical proof of its existence, yet cannot find a scrap of information about it anyway, or evidence that it could possibly be real.
The brilliant Jon Bois, in 2015, wrote an article about his love of accidental YouTube videos: automated content published without its creators' knowledge, cluttering the Internet with the purest kind of material, the sort that doesn't even realize it exists. This is less mysterious, perhaps, than Neil Hamburger's origins, but it achieves something similar: that experience of catching glimpses of something you cannot understand and cannot possibly have more of. This is not for you. It's not for anybody, not even the people who birthed it. And in a world where everything, increasingly, wants to be "for you", whether or not it's healthy for you to have it, there is something wholesome, even healing about that. We live in a world whose biggest companies operate by exploiting you psychologically, to trick you into consuming things on their platforms. There is evidence that consuming things like this makes us anxious and more paranoid and less happy; there is evidence that prolonged use of these platforms fosters political extremism to the point of violence. This is all for you. This is all for you. This is all for you. To come across what's not is like a breath of fresh air.
And that's the appeal, in a nutshell, of On Cinema: not just that it's a satire of the worst aspects of our culture, not just that it sublimely fails to give you the one thing it promises in its title, but that it was made by two people who are uniquely, definitively sick of "appealing to you." Plenty of people find both Heidecker and Turkington off-putting: both of their catalogues are full of foul and putrid things. Both make the things they want to make because, well, they want to; both lucked out and found ways to make a living producing stuff that more people fail to find value in than succeed. They are at this point highly-skilled veterans, and they have seemingly never had to change themselves to suit a focus group or a bad review. The On Cinema-adjacent documentary Mister America was filmed in three days and received mixed reactions from critics; I saw it in a packed theater of oddballs who laughed raucously at every little bit of it. They were gathered together because Mister America only aired in theaters for one night nationwide. On that night, a strange group of people came together and found people they never would have known existed otherwise.
Several weeks ago, I passed a man on the street wearing a shirt with a face of Tom Cruise Heidecker Jr., Heidecker's dearly-departed son, emblazoned on the front. I processed it too slowly to stop and acknowledge the man; I almost immediately regretted it. This is a strange place to find yourself; nobody who likes the show knows what it says about them that they like it, and plenty would not be able to tell you exactly why they like it, or why they laugh at the pieces that they laugh at, or why each and every one of them watched five hours of a murder trial that played out, well, exactly as slowly and drily as a courtroom hearing typically plays out. Yet they have found themselves here. In a world in which too much appeals too many, they have gathered here instead.
Four.
I mention, much too often, the Harry Frankfurter essay On Bullshit. I cannot get it out of my head.
Bullshit, Frankfurter says, you might have heard me echo, exists to serve a purpose other than the one it claims to. It is not a lie, because the purpose of a lie is to mislead, and bullshit doesn't set out to mislead. It doesn't care if it misleads; it doesn't care if it's true, either. Bullshit serves as a means to an end, and that end is always oblique.
To launch a podcast about mental health with an aim other than to provide people with meaningful support is to launch a bullshit podcast. That podcast doesn't exist to help anyone. It exists so that one person can make a name for herself. (Fascinatingly, she doesn't know how she'd make a name for herself: she wants to bullshit, but everything she knows about bullshitting is bullshit in and of itself.)
When Tucker Carlson and his listeners go on about hating, I dunno, Critical Race Theory, they're not really saying anything substantial about Critical Race Theory. They don't know what it is. All they know is that they don't like it, and are scared of it, and want something new to be mad about. It's enjoyable for them, I guess. If there's a message buried beneath the bullshit, it's that they'd rather never hear about anything new, and would rather the country simultaneously stop changing and stop being bad, and since that's a contradiction, they are always going to gnash their teeth at whatever's fed their way.
All the endless conversations about the latest "controversial" film or musician or TV show or whatever—Cardi B, lady Ghostbusters, Game of Thrones, take your pick—exist for one reason and for one reason only, and it's because people know you'll pay attention to whatever they're yammering on about. The same is true of whatever artists are being held up as bold or brave or revolutionary forces: almost none of them are. It's nearly all just entertainment. A Pussy Riot only comes along every now and then, and even then it's not like Pussy Riot is the end-all be-all of art as revolution. Whether positive or negative, most conversations about most things are to siphon away your eyeballs, towards flickers of advertisers who will pay fractions of a penny for whichever one of you they can get to look their way.
This is not to say you can't have meaningful experience with art, or meaningful experiences with media, or meaningful experiences with pop culture ephemera. This is not to say that all content is purposeless and void. But the delivery systems by which we acquire this content don't particularly care about meaning. Content, to them, is bullshit: anything you glean from them is by accident, and you'd better be careful about deciding what means what, because they will absolutely try to sell you on the meaningfulness of things whenever they can. Meaning is a value add: if you believe in it, you'll consume more, so it's in their best interest to tell you everything means something. The more urgently you believe it, the more they can convince you to identify by it, the more penny-fractions they can hoover out of you. And even when you do find meaning, the meaningful thing you've found still exists, on some level, to bolster the platform you're consuming it on, to keep you focused on it, to convince you and everyone who knows you that there is no alternative to this, no possible way to escape it, not one chance in a million that it could ever go away.
Last year, after COVID-19, the network that funded On Cinema—Adult Swim, which historically creates a lot of fantastic and low-budget things—pulled its funding. On Cinema responded by going completely independent: they don't even publish to YouTube anymore. As of now, their bid for independence appears to be a rousing success: they made more money from more subscribers than anybody involved was expecting, and have responded by putting out a shocking and ambitious array of content. They publish "news" stories now. They've already released a live film. A reality TV series appears to be in the works.
This year's Oscar Special was astoundingly innovative: they released two live streams, one per host, dovetailing in and around one another, each a contradictory piece of a whole experience. Their subscriber-only viewer presents you with both videos synced to one another, and gives you control over volume management (which you more-or-less have to tinker with, or else the whole thing becomes unlistenable). It is a peculiar experience, almost certainly not one that will become a medium unto itself, strange even before you get into the material of it all, which at this point is deeply strange itself.
There is no possible way you could predict this thing's fanatic following: no way you could leap from the world of pop-psych podcasts to this monstrous entity, in which a man mumbles incoherent facts about movies into a livestream from his car as another man screams about the presidential election being stolen, and all of this somehow presents itself as "for the masses". There is no real way to leap from two men staring passive-aggressively at each other ten years ago to an action series in which a flabby hero shoots a gun at Dracula, who endorses radical feminism here for purely political-agenda-driven purposes, while his sidekick, a CIA "codebreaker", somehow cracks codes by citing run-times of fifty-year-old films. It is unfathomable that hundreds of thousands of people tuned in to watch a lengthy court hearing that somehow revolved around interrogating the writer of a Star Trek movie about where, exactly, that film took place. And it is very, very difficult to explain, without sounding like a frothing lunatic, exactly what this thing is, or what "is" even means in this context.
If you are looking for something that goes down smooth, something that immediately makes complete and comprehensive sense, there are people who will provide you with such things. You can even pick how long you want that thing to last, or how small the chunks you want that thing to be broken up into. And if you don't like the original way that content was delivered to you, there will be YouTube summaries and reaction videos and best-of compilations to dig through, along with an entire industry's worth of writers providing you with recaps and "thought pieces" and oral histories of that thing, so you can "take part" in it without experiencing it. Because what is an experience anyway, these days, apart from getting to say that you were there?
On Cinema will provide you with none of that. I have watched and rewatched it more times than I can count. It is wonderful; it is worthless. It is the best thing I've seen in years.
Bullshit, Frankfurter says, you might have heard me echo, exists to serve a purpose other than the one it claims to. It is not a lie, because the purpose of a lie is to mislead, and bullshit doesn't set out to mislead. It doesn't care if it misleads; it doesn't care if it's true, either. Bullshit serves as a means to an end, and that end is always oblique.
To launch a podcast about mental health with an aim other than to provide people with meaningful support is to launch a bullshit podcast. That podcast doesn't exist to help anyone. It exists so that one person can make a name for herself. (Fascinatingly, she doesn't know how she'd make a name for herself: she wants to bullshit, but everything she knows about bullshitting is bullshit in and of itself.)
When Tucker Carlson and his listeners go on about hating, I dunno, Critical Race Theory, they're not really saying anything substantial about Critical Race Theory. They don't know what it is. All they know is that they don't like it, and are scared of it, and want something new to be mad about. It's enjoyable for them, I guess. If there's a message buried beneath the bullshit, it's that they'd rather never hear about anything new, and would rather the country simultaneously stop changing and stop being bad, and since that's a contradiction, they are always going to gnash their teeth at whatever's fed their way.
All the endless conversations about the latest "controversial" film or musician or TV show or whatever—Cardi B, lady Ghostbusters, Game of Thrones, take your pick—exist for one reason and for one reason only, and it's because people know you'll pay attention to whatever they're yammering on about. The same is true of whatever artists are being held up as bold or brave or revolutionary forces: almost none of them are. It's nearly all just entertainment. A Pussy Riot only comes along every now and then, and even then it's not like Pussy Riot is the end-all be-all of art as revolution. Whether positive or negative, most conversations about most things are to siphon away your eyeballs, towards flickers of advertisers who will pay fractions of a penny for whichever one of you they can get to look their way.
This is not to say you can't have meaningful experience with art, or meaningful experiences with media, or meaningful experiences with pop culture ephemera. This is not to say that all content is purposeless and void. But the delivery systems by which we acquire this content don't particularly care about meaning. Content, to them, is bullshit: anything you glean from them is by accident, and you'd better be careful about deciding what means what, because they will absolutely try to sell you on the meaningfulness of things whenever they can. Meaning is a value add: if you believe in it, you'll consume more, so it's in their best interest to tell you everything means something. The more urgently you believe it, the more they can convince you to identify by it, the more penny-fractions they can hoover out of you. And even when you do find meaning, the meaningful thing you've found still exists, on some level, to bolster the platform you're consuming it on, to keep you focused on it, to convince you and everyone who knows you that there is no alternative to this, no possible way to escape it, not one chance in a million that it could ever go away.
Last year, after COVID-19, the network that funded On Cinema—Adult Swim, which historically creates a lot of fantastic and low-budget things—pulled its funding. On Cinema responded by going completely independent: they don't even publish to YouTube anymore. As of now, their bid for independence appears to be a rousing success: they made more money from more subscribers than anybody involved was expecting, and have responded by putting out a shocking and ambitious array of content. They publish "news" stories now. They've already released a live film. A reality TV series appears to be in the works.
This year's Oscar Special was astoundingly innovative: they released two live streams, one per host, dovetailing in and around one another, each a contradictory piece of a whole experience. Their subscriber-only viewer presents you with both videos synced to one another, and gives you control over volume management (which you more-or-less have to tinker with, or else the whole thing becomes unlistenable). It is a peculiar experience, almost certainly not one that will become a medium unto itself, strange even before you get into the material of it all, which at this point is deeply strange itself.
There is no possible way you could predict this thing's fanatic following: no way you could leap from the world of pop-psych podcasts to this monstrous entity, in which a man mumbles incoherent facts about movies into a livestream from his car as another man screams about the presidential election being stolen, and all of this somehow presents itself as "for the masses". There is no real way to leap from two men staring passive-aggressively at each other ten years ago to an action series in which a flabby hero shoots a gun at Dracula, who endorses radical feminism here for purely political-agenda-driven purposes, while his sidekick, a CIA "codebreaker", somehow cracks codes by citing run-times of fifty-year-old films. It is unfathomable that hundreds of thousands of people tuned in to watch a lengthy court hearing that somehow revolved around interrogating the writer of a Star Trek movie about where, exactly, that film took place. And it is very, very difficult to explain, without sounding like a frothing lunatic, exactly what this thing is, or what "is" even means in this context.
If you are looking for something that goes down smooth, something that immediately makes complete and comprehensive sense, there are people who will provide you with such things. You can even pick how long you want that thing to last, or how small the chunks you want that thing to be broken up into. And if you don't like the original way that content was delivered to you, there will be YouTube summaries and reaction videos and best-of compilations to dig through, along with an entire industry's worth of writers providing you with recaps and "thought pieces" and oral histories of that thing, so you can "take part" in it without experiencing it. Because what is an experience anyway, these days, apart from getting to say that you were there?
On Cinema will provide you with none of that. I have watched and rewatched it more times than I can count. It is wonderful; it is worthless. It is the best thing I've seen in years.