A familiar theme resonates with the end of 2022, as it has with the end of many recent years: not enough time or freedom! I don’t think I will express better the banality of this frustration than Elisa Gabbert recently did: “I hesitate to say that it’s been a hard year for the third year in a row; surely after three years, that’s just how your life is?” Damned if I didn’t wish I could devote more of myself to modest things like seeing friends, traveling and exploring, writing at length in a comfortable setting, watching films projected on film, and—I could keep going, but I won’t. My professional life and my domestic life are doing fine and I’m very grateful for that; I’m talking about the activities beyond those.
It’s occurred to me that the deep pleasure I take in the process of my pursuits has over time become tangled up with anxieties about the products of those processes and their anticipated reception. I love writing, for example, and I want to share my writing, and to be part of meaningful conversations—ephemeral as well as more enduring—but I’ll often feel prevented from realizing my best work because I’m not able to provide quality attention in any sustained measure. So to compensate, I hedge my bets, and what I share then are “notes,” sketches, fragments, drafts, and so on. (That’s exactly what this substack is.) And I don’t even share them that often. Completing good, polished work seems intimidatingly, stubbornly difficult in the context of a daily life with too many other demands. It’s why, as I’ve aged, I’ve only gained deeper admiration and respect for those people who have figured out ways to think, write, draw, compose, or play impressively while still being caregivers, day-jobbers, and other life-jugglers. Anyway, there is my problem: how to disentangle the process from the product, and the product from concerns over its reception? Some mental reprogramming can be useful, here, and moreover it is something I have some control over.
What I’d like to do in 2023 is do more, but scale down. I want to be more active but less concerned hitting targets of producing, or publishing, or accomplishing certain things.
Let me expand.
The sheer accumulation of movies watched, words read, thoughts probed, etc., feels like it should count for something, shouldn’t it? The amount of time invested into all these things might amount to wasted hours, but we don’t want it to be wasted. I believe anxiety characterizes this model because consumption is much easier than production. (In our media environment, production itself is also heavily constrained by anxieties related to consumption, which is why so many people seek “engagement” as influencers, experts, etc., rather than occupy themselves contentedly in their own smaller pocket of the world.) From a more systems-oriented approach, production that isn’t overdetermined by expectations or hopes of external consumption might be the answer. If one were to habituate more self-justifying and small-scale productive practices, I suspect, there would be a lot of helpful knock-on effects for the individual as well as the communities of which they’re part.
That’s what I want to do. The cybernetics theorist Stafford Beer, in Designing Freedom, argued that “only variety can absorb variety.” So the variety of consumption habits I take up should be balanced with a larger quantity and diversity of productive application. However, rather than thinking of a “product” as a monolith that must be good, and final, I’ll try to think more frequently of production as an activity or a habit. Any finished objects will be the byproduct of something more important: a rhythm, a pulse.
Furthermore, we’d all be better served by attending our productive habits to unspectacular publics: ourselves, friends, neighbors, pen pals, family, small groups of strangers. Make the world weird and full of surprises again. None of this will change the world on its own, but it will change the texture of your world. Practice playing music, but not for the applause. Cook new and great foods, but not for the dopamine hits that come from sharing online. Write, but maybe share only with your best friends. No need to retreat from the Internet. Just put the Internet back in its place. It should serve your needs without reducing you to your mere appetites.
That all said, where the hell did 2022 go? I never felt that I got a real handle on the year. Only in the last few months did I get used to writing the date. To the extent that 2022 marked a lot of serious health challenges for numerous people I love, I’m glad to see the back end of it. I hope 2023 will be better. Otherwise, speaking of leisure, what were the notable things I saw, read, listened to, and so on? Well—I’m not really going to have lists for you, nor substantial commentary. I’ll just say a few things so that if you’re intrigued you can check some things out or argue with me.
The biggest single reading experience of my year was probably Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, which requires but also rewards mental alertness. (As an academic writer, Kenner is both more accessible and denser, more sophisticated than the typical academic writer. His sentences sing, and they are not predictable.) The larger contextualization of Pound’s life and activity in a web of historical circumstance, personages, and practices is a kind of heterogeneous criticism I crave. I also read Kenner’s biography of R. Buckminster Fuller, which is very good in its own right.
I didn’t watch much new TV at all this year; the only standout that comes to mind is HBO’s South Side, which is a phenomenal anarchic comedy.
I also didn’t see a lot of new films in 2022, especially outside of horror/thriller genre, which I tend to see more of because that’s what my partner works on. But I very much liked several things from the small field of contenders, including Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg), Nope (Jordan Peele), Apollo 10 1/2 (Richard Linklater), Resurrection (Andrew Semans), and Armageddon Time (James Gray). None of these are obscure cuts; these days I’m downstream of what’s really going on in contemporary cinema. Even if something’s on my radar, I still probably see it a year or a few years after the critics, programmers, hardcore festivalgoers, etc., do.
I’ll honorably mention Todd Field’s Tár, which I half-expected to hate and wound up liking. That one’s been an interesting cultural object to track, as many of the discussions and soundbites about it diverge heavily from the film I think I saw. A number of people who have strong opinions about Tár, pro or con, appear to think it boils down to a straightforward lesson—about “cancel culture,” “wokeness,” “abuse of power,” or “separating the art from the artist.” And funnily enough two different people may think the film is providing completely opposite “takes” about any one of those topics. Thus, from there, one treats the supposed lesson as equivalent to the film itself, and one likes or dislikes the movie on the basis of where it falls in some simulacrum of the culture wars. “Discourse” flattens and standardizes experience, and annihilates individuality.
RE: the flattening of experience, let me bang this drum one more time (and I’m hardly alone here): too many contemporary genre films seem to be unwilling, or unable, to allow subtext to emerge in a healthy way! They don’t seem to trust the polysemic and unpredictable dimensions of their text, nor their audiences. Instead, in the rush to make every single film be About Trauma, but only in the most obvious and unimaginative ways, some filmmakers seem to be making advertisements for tepid clickbait thinkpieces, and little more. It takes a lot of the joy, spontaneity, and mystery out of these entertainments. And movies, and screen work in general, will be generally better when the people making them are trying to deal with the world (which includes screens) rather than dealing primarily with things they’ve seen on screens (which they mistake for the whole world). RE: worlds and screens, another honorable mention should go to Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.
There are plenty of well-regarded recent titles that I haven’t seen yet and am looking forward to checking out, including The Eternal Daughter, Petite maman, Unrest, Saint Omer, Benediction, Return to Seoul, and a few dozen more. Plus, if there are under-the-radar movies you saw for the first time this past year and want to recommend, new or old, please do share—leave a comment, or hit me up elsewhere. Happy new year. May you all enjoy ingesting your own private plastics.
Kinda scary how much I relate with the views in this post. Z., I'm surprised you didn't even mention THE BANSHEES. Haven't you watched it yet?
Loved this post - thanks Zach. Is the term "unspectacular publics" your own coining? Either way, it gets at something I have been struggling to articulate (to myself and sometimes to a few friends) about how my chosen path, filmmaking, seems hopelessly divorced from the normal, humane process of making art primarily of and for one's own local, rooted community (normal, that is, to every age prior to modern technocratic society). If one wants to be a filmmaker today, such a desire comes pre-loaded with assumptions and desires for a certain trajectory that ends in 'success' i.e. wide viewership, festival approval, financial windfall, etc. How do we creatively encourage and affirm the value of 'unspectacular publics' when so many of our own desires and culturally embedded messages, especially those of success in the most maximal sense, play serpent in the garden?