67: How To with John Wilson

My husband got me hooked on How To with John Wilson at the end of last season. He's a much better TV watcher than I am, which usually means he's watching some really good TV shows that I'm not, because I get overwhelmed by the number of shows I'm ostensibly supposed to be watching. I tend not to try a new TV show until I've heard that it's good, and by then there's usually a season or two of backlog that I need to catch up with, and that's a lot of commitment for one show. You can forget it completely if the entire season drops on the same day. I'm not cut out for binge watching, and even if I were, I'd still hate the phrase. "Binge" implies an unhealthy relationship with something, too much of it all at once.

How To with John Wilson feels like a balm. It's nonfiction TV, more along the lines of video essay than straight documentary. Each episode starts with a basic question–how to find a public restroom in New York City, how to cook risotto, how to make small talk. The episodes are brief, spanning about half an hour each, but Wilson manages to build a compelling portrait of the quirks of human existence out of the mundane questions he starts with. Anyone can do the things that Wilson has questions about, but everyone does those things differently, and people are weird. Each episode starts with a basic question, but they always spiral out into unexpected directions. Sometimes the titular "how to" is answered in the first few minutes, and the rest of the episode explores a tangent raised by someone Wilson just happened to meet.

It's a testament to Wilson's curiosity that he's able to chase down those other stories down from the minutae he learns about during chance encounters. Wilson has a knack for observation, for meeting people with strange interests, and for catching people in unguarded moments when they don't think anyone else is watching. This probably stems from the fact that he's constantly filming, but the coherence of Wilson's episodes is also a strength of the show's editing. Adam Locke-Norton splices incidental footage of people and objects that Wilson finds on the New York City streets into each episode: a broken fan spinning in the wind next to a garbage pile when Wilson invokes sports fans, to name one. These incidental observations of everyday life lend the show a sense of wry humor. Sometimes they spin out into other stories, lending the show a rabbit-tunnel feeling. Other times, they're just texture.

Crucially, these incidental encounters don't feel exploitative (although they are frequently weird and sometimes gross). Wilson, who rarely appears in the footage he shoots, is omnipresent through the way he shoots his footage, and through his use of off-the-cuff voiceover; he isn't speaking from any sense of authority or superiority. The subjectiveness of Wilson's footage, and the way that he uses it to write a video essay in an attempt to make sense of some aspect of his own life, puts Wilson on the same level as the people he's filming. He's stuck on a strange planet with the rest of us, and he's got questions about it. I'm glad he's out there sharing it with the rest of us.

What I talked about:

For Seeing & Believing podcast, Kevin and I reviewed The Last Voyage of the Demeter. Kevin paired it with Das Boot for a "peril on the high seas" double feature. Too bad Demeter isn't more of a Dad Movie to go along with it. We also have an announcement about the future of Seeing & Believing–more on that front in the coming weeks.

I also returned to Eye of the Duck as a guest to talk about The NeverEnding Story, a buck-wild movie that I did not grow up with. (I didn't plan to have two separate podcasts about two different Wolfgang Petersen movies–it just turned out that way!) I've got spicy opinions about the Artax scene!

What I'm reading:

Infinite Jest procrastination watch: technically not procrastinating on Infinite Jest because I had to sit down and revisit the Arthur C. Clarke novelization of 2001: A Space Odyssey for a future podcast appearance. I've read 2001 before, but it was back when I was in late middle/early high school and hadn't realized what a masterpiece the original movie was. The movie's great! I'm still mixed on the book!