On ‘How To With John Wilson,' ‘Deerskin,’ And 2020
A shitty year lived through addictive screens
Hello. This is the first FiveThirtyNine piece. It’s an extended essay on How To With John Wilson, Deerskin, 2020, only seeing the world through your phone and maybe a few other things. If you enjoy it, consider subscribing and/or sharing. I’ll probably send out a list of shows/programs/movies/etc. I enjoyed most sometime in January.
I think 2020 would’ve been infinitely more tolerable if I could’ve spent two hours a week at Nitehawk. Ly likes reminding me movies are one of the few entertainments we can still fully enjoy in COVID era but – hot take – it’s not the same at home. If I told someone I missed museums they’d never be like, “Ok but why not just check out Starry Night dot jpeg on Google?”
It feels dumb to long for one screen given how flush our lives already are with screens plural. iPhone, iPad, MacBook Nintendo Switch and so on. Still the “silver screen” remains the only screen that allows me to transcend the both the physical and the digital world. Which is to say, it’s the only screen that doesn’t routinely make me feel terrible about myself.
Paradoxically, the movies are the only place I feel truly beholden to a strict ‘no screen’ policy. It’s my chosen escape from the “War on Screen Time” that’s played out over the better part of the 21st century. And there was a shit ton of things worth escaping from this year. Which made it harder to detach from the other screens. Remember Trump-COVID week? It became impossible to go even two hours without having (or feeling compelled) to stare at my phone and computer screens.
I presume this is what drew me towards to my favorite works of the year: HBO’s How To With John Wilson and Quentin Duplex’s Deerskin. Projects united in their attempts to understand how denizens of the 21st century observe and process the world, as well as ourselves and each other, on and through our non-IMAX[1] screens. Shot before[2] the pandemic took hold, each feels prophetic in their equally hilarious and remarkably uncomfortable attempts to grapple with how we observe our surroundings and build identity in a digital world. Meditations on how omnipresent screens and recording devices have reshaped our relationships to the people, places and ideas that inhabit the physical realm for all the better, the worse and undeniably weirder.
My parents gave me my first cellphone in the 6th grade for “emergency use only.” Of course, I considered boredom an emergency. Played a shit ton of that Snake game preloaded onto my Nokia. All to say, I’ve been hooked on phone since middle school.
In retrospect, it feels like I was gifted an appendage in my phone. I depend on it more than any toe. Seventeen years since receiving it, the amount of self-hate I feel for my attachment to my phone doesn’t seem much different than the self-consciousness I feel about most everything else[3]. Alas, committing to a drastic change in phone habits never seems like a realistic option. Until I go full Into the Wild, attempting to manage my relationship with my phone might be the best I can ever hope for. I associate my phone with connection to the rest of the world.
The central figures in How To With John Wilson and Deerskin - John Wilson and Georges (Jean Dujardin[4]), respectively – try to manage their own technological addictions. Both are seemingly lost men trying to make sense of the world through their respective DV camcorders’ monitor screens.
Occasionally, each work reveals glimpses of John and Georges in mirrors holding up their cameras. I found it incredibly easily to imagine myself in their stead, staring at the world through any of my iPhone’s three (!!!) lens on its ever-so-slightly cracked screen. Unlike me, though, neither John nor Georges vocally lament their screen dependencies. They’ve come to embrace technology not as a distraction but a necessary conduit to understand both their own lives and the worlds they inhabit.
John Wilson only vaguely explains why he started obsessively shooting the eccentric b-roll footage that comprises almost the entire six episode run of How To. In the “How To Improve Your Memory” episode, Wilson explains that he began filming in part because of his own insecurities about having a lackluster memory[5]. His desire to remember scenes from everyday life explains how he ended up with so much footage that feels more appropriate for a YouTube channel with a couple hundred views than HBO. In this sense, Wilson’s camera is a utilitarian tool. He depends on it to compensate for his own perceived deficiency.
Similarly in Deerskin, Georges utilizes his camera in an effort to make himself whole. When we first meet Georges, he stews in self-loathing. After catching a glimpse in a car window of himself wearing a corduroy jacket, Georges retreats to a gas station bathroom and tries (unsuccessfully) to flush the jacket down the toilet. The moment captures his desire to shed both his identity and a past of disappointment. Georges spends his last 7,500 euros on a vintage deerskin jacket. The seller, while counting up the money shocked he’s actually making so much on an old jacket, throws in an “almost new digital video recorder.” If the deerskin jacket represents Georges psychological rebirth, then it is the camera that allows him to self-actualize his chosen identity. After admiring himself (and his new, “killer” jacket) in the mirror a bit longer, Georges toys around with his camera. It’s as if he’s asked himself what’s the point of reinventing yourself if there’s no proof to post on the ‘gram?
It’s the question of the digital age. What is anything in the physical realm but fodder for the digital one? If someone runs a marathon, will anyone hear about it if the runner doesn’t post on Facebook? Or worse, would anyone care?
Quick aside: A huge FUCK YOU to whichever Apple developer came up with the idea for screen time reports? I know they rolled it out in 2019, but it’s profoundly messed up that Tim Cook didn’t quietly remove the feature sometime in 2020[6]. Offlining yourself in 2020 was barely an option for any except the offensively privileged and/or reckless. Shaming people trying their best to connect virtually instead of physically? Dick move.
A global crisis should’ve brought us all together. Reflecting on this year, though, I mostly recall myself being needlessly critical of others. About what? Mostly the behavior of semi-acquaintances who I only saw or heard from on Instagrams and Twitter. It feels like anyone who hasn’t done exactly what I’ve been doing since March is inexcusably in the wrong.
“Oh, [redacted] from high school posted a pic from another bar tonight? What a fucking reckless, inconsiderate, piece of shit. There’s a pandemic going on!!”
“Jesus, [redacted name]’s making another holier-than-thou post about how anyone who even considers dining out is Satan’s spawn? What a judgmental, paranoid hypochondriac.”
Stuck at home with these social media snapshots from others’ lives as my main form of social sustenance, I feel like I lost some of my capacity for empathy. I didn’t consider that beneath the filters and edits was a reality any different from what I saw on the screen.
John Wilson examines how often we fall into this trap. In the middle of his “How to Put Up Scaffolding” episode, he shows a montage of classic New York landmarks as shown in popular movies. The Flatiron Building in The Usual Suspects. The Plaza Hotel in Midnight Cowboy. 101 Park Avenue in Gremlins 2. All shown in their beautiful, unobstructed splendor on the screen. In his real, less poetic footage, Wilson cuts to each building, obstructed by unromantic scaffolding. “We cover ourselves in scaffolding all the time,” he proffers right after the montage. It’s true on literal (braces, casts, as Wilson mentions) and emotional (the distance between our actual lives and the curated images we post on social media) levels, but it seems like we only offer shots of our brief moments without the obstructions of scaffolding to others in the digital world.
If How To focuses on the unrealistic, heavily curated images that make it onto our screens, Dupuiex’s Deerskin places attention on the curators, editing and filter-ifying the images that make it to our screens, under a microscope.
In Georges’ quixotic mission to reinvent himself in the trail of his failed marriage, he settles on the idea of making his Deerskin jacket the only jacket in the world. He ropes small town bartender by trade, amateur film editor by passion, Denise (Adéle Haenel) into his slapdash scheme under false pretense, claiming he’s a professional “filmmaker.” Georges convinces strangers to act in his “movie,” making them proclaim, “I swear never to wear a jacket as long as I live,” on camera before throwing every jacket they own in the trunk of his car. After each shoot, Georges flees the scene with his actors’ jackets in tow, much to their confusion and anger. For Georges, Dupiuex’s idea of a content creator, the image captured on his camera is as real as anything else in his life. For his actors, though, their actions are nothing more than roleplay. Dupuiex casually reveals the friction between reality and fiction constantly rubbing against each other on our screens.
Sure, Georges isn’t a filmmaker in the conventional sense, but he’s no less a storyteller than anyone with access to any rudimentary recording device. John Wilson’s work is almost entirely predicated on the idea having any footage at all is enough to tell a tale.
We almost all have access to the basic necessities for video production and distribution. The only major difference between the images our “friends” (and John Wilson and Georges) project online and the ones studios place in theaters is that exhibitors and moviegoers have a tacit agreement on what’s truth and what’s fiction. Scrolling through social media feeds, though, there’s no genre label or plot synopsis helping us determine what the account who posted it truly intended or meant. The disconnect we see between Georges and his actors - Georges’ thinking he’s making a documentary, while his actors presume they’re in a comedy - plays nonstop on our screens. We spend such huge chunks of our time deciphering the meanings and subtexts of presumed subtweets and statuses we see online, eventually arriving at definitive conclusions about people we’d second-guess even saying hello to offline.
After editing through Georges’ first batch of footage, Denise, already aware Georges isn’t exactly the filmmaker he claims to be, offers her thoughts on his gonzo footage.
“Maybe it’s just my interpretation, but the real subject of the film is the jacket. Your jacket,” she says. “Or rather, the fact that we all hide behind a shell to protect us from the outside world.”
“Should it be about that?” Georges asks in response. “Maybe that’s what it about.”
She’s clearly upset realizing she’s put in more thought longer and harder about the power of Georges’ videos than Georges himself. It’s that all-too-relatable feeling of embarrassment. That we’ve read too much into a post. Denise’s tone shifts, barely hiding disappointment. “Well, you should know.”
A lot of my conversations in 2020 revolved around “doing things differently” after the pandemic ends. Actually making time for that one trip. No more bailing on plans after a long day at work. In general, living a life not unlike that of Jim Carrey’s character in Yes Man (specifically, the portion of the movie where he says ‘yes’ to everything). As if being stuck inside was the kick in the ass we needed to get priorities in check. Cynically, I suspect this resolution to change will have as much staying power as most made at New Year’s[7].
Yearning for change is distinctly human. This desire unites John Wilson, Georges and all of the wildly unique characters[8] John Wilson meets out in the world. They desire different things – some a new sense of identity. Others, a regrown foreskin - but hide behind different, as Denise says, shells.
I think I hide my own insecurities and desire for approval behind the shell of a detached, irony-wielding Internet asshole. Often during the year I felt inexplicable anger towards the digital avatars of people that popped up on my screen. Not to mention, hurt from people who I, selfishly, felt weren’t giving me attention I felt entitled to. It’s from this same base of anger and pain that Deerskin and How To With John Wilson truly diverge from each other.
Given Dupieux’s entire filmography skews existential, if not outright nihilistic, the last third of Deerskin doesn’t play out surprisingly. At the behest of his jacket[9], Georges films himself murdering anyone who refuses to relinquish their jackets with the sharpened blade of a ceiling fan. Georges has become so enamored with the idea of being a singularly unique person on screen that he’s lost touch with any humanity. Eventually, Georges is shot and killed by the father of a mute boy.[10] Denise, having filmed the whole ordeal, retrieves Georges’ jacket, puts it on and resumes filming herself in the same jacket. The implication being that for all the jacket’s beauty, it was little more than a filter. A shell. No matter how much Georges desired change or to present himself to strangers as different person, he fundamentally remained the same person we met trying to flush his corduroy jacket down a gas station bathroom. Deerskin suggests we drive ourselves insane trying to construct an image of ourselves as one-of-a-kind for others in the digital sphere.
If Deerskin decries the phoniness of life lived on screen, How To With John Wilson celebrates the possibility of connecting with others through them. Unlike Georges, John Wilson expects nothing of the people he captures on his camera. Instead of asking the people he films to play a part, Wilson simply offers them his undivided attention and opportunity to reveal their authentic selves. Wilson withholds judgment and as a show, How To resists any urges to make its subjects look anything other than beautifully, therefore imperfectly, human. It’s an absolute wonder watching how much strangers will reveal of themselves on screen when allowed to step out from behind their shells.
In an episode on ‘How To Make Small Talk,’ John meets Chris, a wannabe rapper, after mistakenly booking a trip to Cancun during MTV Spring Break. At first, Chris postures for Wilson’s camera, wearing the persona of a braggadocious rapper who cares about little more than weed, women and wild times. Lesser shows would settle on leaving Chris as a one-dimensional joke: the idiot kid from high school who always posts their embarrassing SoundCloud raps. But How To implores its audience to find the humanity in each other. Days after their first encounter, Wilson films Chris again. Without the pressure to impress Wilson’s camera, Chris speaks honestly about the anxieties and pain that only now, in retrospect, clearly existed in the man we wanted to mock earlier. Chris mentions a friend who killed himself shortly before he took the trip. “Nobody’s real,” Chris says. “It’s hard to even converse with anybody down here. Cause they’re too busy and occupied, being, being,” he pauses, “typical.” Nobody, of course, includes himself.
Throughout its six episode run, How To intercuts its comedy with these often revelatory moments of radical honesty from real people. A travel agent acknowledges an unsuccessful marriage. A consortium of soccer referees cry for fairness at a holiday dinner. Even Wilson, trying to show appreciation (and temporary concern[11]) for his caring, elderly landlord as COVID-19 first hits New York City, by making her the perfect risotto. Through the screen, in the last episode’s final moments, Wilson himself finally enters the makeshift confessional he’s turned his camera into. He philosophizes through the screen directly to his audience, as if they’re the ones recording him on their iPhones: “You begin to curse yourself for waiting so long…It seemed like there was no right way to do anything anymore and every decision you made to survive was a calculated risk, and the world has no place for a purist.”
Maybe Deerskin is right in its conclusion that personal change and growth can never be fully reflected on our screens. But How To counters by imploring its audience to at least try shedding their shells. To stop pursuing the perfect image of ourselves, but the real one in every facet of our lives.
So much of everyday life plays out in our stories and feeds and (unfortunately??) fleets. Times Square sits empty but, in 2020, the digital world never felt more crowded. Our capacity for the profoundly weird and confronting an uncertain world has never been more pronounced. Nothing on screen proved more unbelievable than real life this year. That’s why both How To With John Wilson and Deerskin manage to encapsulate 2020 so fittingly. Most visuals from Deerskin look like something Wilson’s camera could have caught in the physical realm. In turn, the nonfiction of How To is often stranger than the fiction of Deerskin. That’s 2020.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Or even LIEmax. God, I miss ranting to my friends about how there are actually only two real IMAX screens in New York. The rest are LIEmax screens that are only slightly larger than regular screens. A sham! Know your IMAX!
[2] Except for one portion of How To With John Wilson, that I’ll discuss a little later. [3] A lot.
[4] I tried but couldn’t think up any actor who’s given such a wild performances in their post-Oscar career.
[5] In interviews about the show, Wilson’s referenced his previous career as a private investigator’s assistant as the job that led him to make his particular brand of modern art. A brand that, given the show’s critical popularity, will surely be imitated for years to come in lesser, more slapdash art.
[6] Especially that interminable, psychotic span of time between Trump getting COVID and the week-long election.
[7] Funny to think one of my New Year’s resolutions for 2020 was to be on my phone less.
[8] They’re real people but characters remains an incredibly apt description
[9] By this point in the movie, Georges’ jacket is talking back to him.
[10] It’s a weird movie!
[11] Wilson recently reported that his landlord, who had a second stroke while Wilson was filming the show, is doing alright! Phew.