What’s so good about feeling bad? An amazing thing about the movies is how much they reveal in their audience. Four years ago, Ti West’s X demonstrated a generation gap when it came to old age: Millennials, by then nearly all in their 30s, didn’t regard aging with the same fear and revulsion that Zoomers did. The Substance broke through because it was about women in the entertainment industry, and it dealt with the kind of daily human vanity that the movies rarely give us; an enormous amount of women have lived the mirror scene. But Demi Moore isn’t decrepit in The Substance—well, maybe for Hollywood, but anyone who watches that movie understands, and feels on a gut level, that this is a gorgeous woman regardless of her age. Most actors and actresses have already taken some substance (or surgery) to look better (younger) in a cosmetics-first industry.
Revulsion is hard to hide. How can anyone label John Wilson and Nathan Fielder as practitioners of the “New Cruelty”? I’ve never seen Wilson’s HBO show How To with John Wilson, but apparently the same people who find Nathan Fielder “cruel” and “evil” (??) regard Wilson with the same suspicion and antipathy. Is this a Canadian hangup? I don’t understand how anyone can call anything Fielder’s done “cruel.” Show me an example. What is cruel about Nathan for You or The Rehearsal or The Curse?
Wilson and Fielder are 21st-century Gonzo journalists, inserting themselves into stories about kooky, off-the-wall characters that mirror, echo, illuminate, and complicate the world. The first season of The Rehearsal dealt with social anxiety, while the second season took off into the interior emotional lives of airplane pilots and how their feelings may or may not compromise their work (and their passengers). The Curse was a very soft satire of muckrakers and minority opportunists taking advantage of white guilt. Nathan For You was the grounded, human answer to the smug and misanthropic work of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, two people who embraced cruelty and disgust from the start of their careers.
What’s so bad about feeling good? Fielder and Wilson’s work share a bemused, benevolent curiosity with everything around them, from the ground they walk on to the people that share the world with us. Neither dabble in the dark art of Allen Funt and Ashton Kutcher; this isn’t Candid Camera, it’s not Punk’d, it’s How To and For You. That so many people consider their work “nasty” and “cynical” only betrays their own bias against “uncool” people and social misfits. During Wilson’s attenuated study of the history of concrete (not the same as cement, as you’ll learn), he spends a significant amount of time with a middle-aged man on Long Island who plays in a bar band. They do “some covers, some originals,” but the main guy is the only one who’s really into it—his drummer tells Wilson that he was in “the original Chainsmokers” back in the 1960s, and he considered filing a lawsuit against the highly successful pop group of the same name, but “it hasn’t really gone anywhere.”
What’s so cruel? What’s so funny? Is it so much to ask people to just listen to this guy and take him at his word, at face value? Ditto the main dude, whose passion for music and commitment to his work may appear delusional or even arrogant to those who’ve never been able to muster any kind of enthusiasm or energy for anything in their lives, but for anyone with some motivating force, he’s an interesting character, a person who deserves respect and someone who Wilson pointedly does not make fun of; Heidecker and Wareheim would’ve put him in a diaper or something.
The History of Concrete isn’t ideological either, although it makes some tenuous and largely unfinished assays into the vagaries of capitalism. (Those who call it “late capitalism” probably don’t know that communists have been calling it “late capitalism” for over a century. What would they call Maoist China?) If you can get past Wilson’s at-first-unbearable nasally public radio voice, The History of Concrete is an amusing if brief survey of an under-examined and omnipresent part of the world. And it really is, for the most part, a history of concrete: most of Wilson’s interview subjects are contractors, bricklayers, even security guards outside the Pantheon in Rome, the oldest known concrete structure on Earth. I wish he interviewed some umarells! I feel more and more like an umarell every day, and I’d like to know more. Got enough for another trip to Rome, buddy?
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM