And it’s an exhaustion. It’s an absolute, the end of expression.

"I will try now to give a coherent account of my disintegrated self, for when I turned away from you, the one God, and pursued a multitude of things, I went to pieces." -St. Augustine

Yesterday, I was driving a work van down Floral Ave and was the first car stopped at a red light at the Burbank intersection. The red light would not change to green. I waited. Cars behind me started to honk. There were loud shouts. The cars coming from the other direction were all going through the red light. I sat and waited. A woman walked up to the van and shouted at me that people behind me told her that the light was broken. I shouted back that it appeared to be working and that it was currently red, which meant that I could not drive through it. I asked her if she understood basic traffic laws and told her that I would not disobey those laws. More honking. More shouting. More cars from the other side going through the light. Eventually one car from behind me left the lane and passed about five cars to pass me and go through the light. A few minutes later, about eight cars did the same, traveling down the opposite lane and going through the red light while opposing traffic was continuing to go through. People passed me and yelled at me. At that point, I made a legal right turn on red to avoid being the cause of these idiots creating a giant traffic accident. I was sitting there for about ten minutes before I turned.

Really, I don't care about traffic laws. But it amused me in the moment to play a character who believes so strongly in obeying traffic laws that he will suffer through the disdain and outright hatred of his fellow man for doing so. I played it straight and did not break character. It was funny to me, but I didn't laugh. It was more important to me that this persona that I had adopted maintain its integrity than for me to get any immediate humor out of it. Except that that's the only reason that I committed to the action, because of the humor, maybe because of some core truth that strained toward integrity. There was a co-worker in the van with me that I had just picked up from a garage. Maybe the "joke" was for her, part of it being pressing her alternating embarrassment and amusement with my stubbornness. But I don't think that's entirely the case. It was for the cars behind me and the people walking by and the people passing happily going through the red light, for everyone who helpfully told me that the light was broken. Mostly, it was for myself, to be honest to a role that I may have just come up with at whim, but that I was fully committed to. Anything less seemed like a betrayal. Even the legal right turn seemed like a weak concession made by that character. The character that I was playing was going straight and would wait until it was legal and proper to do so. But the part of me that could reflect on having to deal with getting the work van hit by another car made the choice that it wasn't worth it.

And so when I write that Rick Alverson's Entertainment is a movie that I understand and appreciate with a deeply instinctive, personal passion, maybe that unfeigned love for such an abrasively rigorous film makes more sense in the context of a life of acting, of entertaining and being entertained. The stand-up stage (or any stage) offers a clear demarcation between face and mask, but we all wear different masks every day in the ways in which we present ourselves to the world. But to the extent that we do this, the mask becomes the face or vice versa. The other day, I had to "act mean" to kick some kids out of an apartment. I didn't really care about what these kids did, but my job was to play this role. And there's no way to "act mean" without channeling mean emotions, without actually being the mean guy. We sometimes forget that we are all actors, in that every thing that we *do* is an action, an act.

This always-consciousness of acting, though, is a bit of a curse. Those of us who are constantly evaluating our emotions and actions feel separate from our emotions and actions. They are costumes that we wear, but not ourselves. And if this is so, maybe our selves aren't really there, there is no core identity. There is only an emptiness. I believe that this emptiness is false, but the "feeling" is a reality. Exploring this reality of the disintegrated self has been Alverson's consistent project across his films.

In his book Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide To Late Capitalist Television, Adam Kotsko evaluates the television show Dexter.

"Listening to Dexter's monologue about this gap between his performance and the feelings others supposedly "really" have, it struck me that his problem stems from the very fact that he thinks he's missing out on something. What is a genuinely nice guy, for instance, if not someone who is in the habit of acting like a nice guy? How many people, when consoling a friend, honestly feel empathy in any gut-level way? He believes that his performance of these rituals when he doesn't "really" feel the corresponding emotion makes him a kind of monster, when in reality everyone else is mostly just going through the motions as well. Other than his secret habit of ritually murdering people, the only thing preventing him from being a "normal" person is his very belief that there is an obstacle."

"At that time I was truly miserable, for I loved feeling sad and sought out whatever could cause me sadness. When the theme of a play dealt with other people’s tragedies—false and theatrical tragedies—it would please and attract me more powerfully the more it moved me to tears. I was an unhappy beast astray from your flock and resentful of your shepherding, so what wonder was it that I became infected with foul mange? My love for tragic scenes sprang from no inclination to be more deeply wounded by them, for I had no desire to undergo myself the woes I liked to watch. It was simply that when I listened to such doleful tales being told they enabled me superficially to scrape away at my itching self, with the result that these raking nails raised an inflamed swelling, and drew stinking discharge from a festering wound. Was that life I led any life at all, O my God?" -St. Augustine

I'm currently in the middle of a re-read of Augustine's Confessions. I highly recommend the book to all of you. The entire book is a prayer; I think that you would all appreciate prayer more if you ever heard anyone pray like Augustine! Most interestingly for this blog's purposes, there are many places in which Augustine interacts positively and negatively with the entertainments of his youth. I'm pretty sure that Rick Alverson would like The Confessions. Josh Larson of Filmspotting recently released a book titled Movies Are Prayers. I've only dipped into it a little bit (it's got a great introduction by Matt Zoller Seitz) so can't speak to the book as a whole, but I love the title (with some reservations, of course!). Relating this to Entertainment, I'm obviously suggesting that the film is a prayer. There is a yearning for connection and for reality, for Connection and Reality, for an integrated self instead of a disintegrated self, not "success" but being able to somehow feel whole and be whole. There are a few hints in Entertainment (not to mention Alverson's other work) that this fullness of Reality is to be found in the Creator and Sustainer, apart from which we disintegrate.

I do realize that most of this "film writing" here has not at all engaged with the details of Alverson's film. I could and maybe I will. I need repeated viewings. It deserves repeated viewings, which is probably the best praise I can give it. But for right now I refer you to the following review. It's not full-deep analysis, but it's a good review that actually understands the film. There is much more digging to do. "As each of these scenes grows progressively more surreal, The Comedian simultaneously recedes as a traditional character with legible feelings and emerges instead as the core of the film’s rich, abstract expression of the troubles of self-consciousness."
http://cinema-scope.com/features/funniest-joke-world-rick-alversons-entertainment/

And here's a great interview with Alverson and Turkington. The interviewer asks pretty basic questions and they respond with graciousness. Alverson is more aloof (though does answer mostly straightforwardly) while Turkington reveals himself as a basically sweet guy, open to communicating all of the secrets of his trade.
https://youtu.be/yhhXLZNL4IQ

And this piece is also definitely worth reading:
https://consequenceofsound.net/2015/11/the-end-of-expression-a-conversation-with-rick-alverson-and-gregg-turkington/
“Look at Bill Cosby. Here’s a guy who has the most sincere sort of stand-up,” Turkington observes. “But I dare say that’s more of a character than Neil Hamburger. Based on what we’re seeing in the news right now, that is a real mask that guy had on up there.”

As a side note, I've been aware of Neil Hamburger for nearly 20 years. It was the fall of '99 that I discovered Will Oldham (star of Alverson's New Jerusalem). In the next few years, looking through Drag City catalog listings, I'd come across the name of the "legendary" comedian Neil Hamburger. He was a mystery to me then. The internet hadn't had him pegged yet and I had little information. I never bought any of his recordings, but I was always hoping that I'd catch him live sometime. I never did.

As a side side note, my friend Dan introduced me to Oldham through this SubPop single: https://www.subpop.com/releases/bonnie_prince_billy/lets_start_a_family_a_whorehouse_is_any_house_limit_2. We'd listen to records in his dorm room often. And this specific time, I made him replay this 7" record over and over and over and over again. It was one of the best things I had ever heard. Soon enough, I found another friend (thank you, Kate) who made me a bootleg cassette of early Palace stuff. Dan was a huge film fan and encouraged me to make lists. '99 was a great year for many reasons and a great film year, but it was mostly great because Dan was there and because I was watching great films and listening to great music with him. Dan is dead now and I miss him greatly. I think that he would have loved Entertainment. Damn it, I'm crying writing this.

Entertainment.