Nathan for You & Bazin

This is a bit late, but that’s generally how I work. As it is, I think it’s worth remembering how innovative and hilarious the second season of Nathan Fielder’s Nathan for You was this year. Nathan was on a serious crusade against the complacent, modern-day film-going public in Season 2. I’d like to single out a particular episode—“Souvenir Shop; ELAIFF”—that was not the most lauded or headline-grabbing but which, for the purposes of this writing, proved fascinating and expansive in its scope. In fact, this particular episode may have successfully encapsulated the entire scope of cinema history by deliberately asking the wrong question—or asking the right question, as the likes of Bazin before him (as I’d like to contend and compare/contrast, if time serves), but deliberately doing so for all the wrong reasons. That question being: what is the minimum requirement for motion pictures/cinema/film to be considered as such? Nathan provided a wry, cynical, updated twist on Bazin’s query, “what is cinema?

Bazin sought to cull the full-potential of the medium, the essence of the form that only film or motion pictures could and can elicit. His conclusion, to poorly summarize, was the capacity to envisage “reality”—to portray existing (at the time of filming) objects in time (which can be experienced by the viewer in a mode akin to the manner in which we perceive time in everyday life) and construct a recognizable, habitable realm that in turn reflects back on the world in which we actually live, for better or worse. As you can tell from this rambling summary, this is not an easy question to answer if only for the reason that film/cinema can take so many forms and functions and thus becomes difficult to describe in any single way.

Nathan Fielder, in asking a similar if inverted version of this Bazinian inquiry, subsequently inverts the entire progression of cinema over the last century-plus, and brings the medium full circle, with a 22-minute TV show no less. Not half-bad. So, where to begin? It is important to note, off-the-bat, that the purpose of his experiment is unabashedly commercial, as is the Trojan horse premise of his program. On Nathan for You, our eponymous “hero” approaches middling businesses, usually in the Los Angeles area, with cockamamie-but-still-within-the-realm-of-the-possible marketing strategies. For example, he created a near impossible rebate return system requiring patrons seeking cheaper gas to climb a mountain and answer riddles, he also staged a viral-video creating a hero-pig for a flagging petting zoo, and, recently, he hooked a mechanic to a lie-detector test for customers, and convinced a real estate agent to guarantee her homes “ghost free”.

In his scheme for “Souvenir Shop; ELAIFF” he attempted to help an off-strip souvenir store spur business by setting up a fake movie set outside the shop. The mounting problem becomes: how does one make this legitimate so as to avoid fraud? Since he is coercing patrons in by labeling them “extras” and instructing them to buy large quantities of items, he is skirting legality. So, he must make this fake set-up into something legitimate or open himself up to legal action. The business angle is crucial here. By making his entry-point from a marketing angle (approaching the shop as a marketing consultant), the film set itself is thus purely an extension of this and thus becomes a business tactic designed to make money. There is no contention that this is meant to be a creative outlet or an art piece. The product is not the focus; it is the afterthought. This is the basis for his critique of modern filmmaking, but, things dig deeper from here.

So, how does a movie production draw people in? Here it obviously begins with location shooting—bringing the process to the people, thus spreading the word of mouth. So, here, the actual production process doubles as a marketing strategy, both literally—as they are one and the same in the program—and figuratively—on a theoretical/analytical level within Nathan’s veiled meta-critique. Once the location is strategized for maximum impact and set, what comes next? The material set-up of a movie production is also a large component of this scheme. In the program there is a particular set-up necessary to identify this as a film set. Naturally, you need an area cordoned off (to separate crew and spectators). This division becomes heavily symbolic within the episode as it represents the divide between the people who understand the set-up and those being duped. This dynamic heightens that which exists in real life between the industry insiders and the consumers to which they ostensibly cater. The manner in which Nathan sets up this dynamic is revealing in multiple ways. The fact that within this construction the difference lies in power and knowledge is significant for understanding Nathan’s criticism and analysis as it plays out here. In this construction, the industry (by which I mean mainstream Hollywood cinema, which is exactly the type which Nathan is recreating on a smaller scale) is essentially tricking the consumers/public into purchasing a product. Nathan literalizes this transaction within the episode by, in his role as “director,” ordering patrons/“extras” to buy more and more. In this way the criticism is clear and skews into dark recesses of consumer capitalism (again this resurfaces, probably not for the last time).

So far we have a set, and division between insiders and outsiders, then you need the apparatuses—large cameras, the larger the better, so as to attract attention. If you have large cameras it lets spectators know this is a larger budget affair and thus higher spectacle-potential. You also need your set personalities—director, actor, crew, etc. Nathan plays director, keeping his scheme in line. As such his job essentially becomes coordinating, organizing, and ensuring the marketability of the product. He is playing dual roles here and as such they coalesce and further color the underlying criticism of the piece. He is both freelance marketing consultant and film director, and as such he argues that they are, within this particular dominant portion of the film industry, one and the same. Of course, you can set up a set with cameras, but you still need the spectacle to draw people in—you need a big name actor at the least. Cue Johnny Depp impersonator (and a worse Johnny Depp impersonator to make the first one seem better by comparison). Spectacle is the key word, and Nathan puts all the components in place, but tries to cut as many corners as possible to reveal the artifice and absurdity of each piece.

Nathan strives for nothing close to this. His piece strives for ludicrousness and patrons buying in wholesale. Nathan is largely unconcerned with audience experience, whereas this is Bazin’s main focus in setting up his argument. Nathan must eventually achieve some rudimentary response (and this becomes another sticking point in his overall argument and critique of the system) but ultimately he seeks to undercut audience reaction as well by setting an improbably low-bar for what qualifies. Nathan acknowledges the various, frequently compartmentalized nature of the modern viewing experience. He watches his creation in solitude in his small office. He shows his judge confidant on the man’s back patio via his laptop, seeking approval. Finally, he shows his work on a screen at a small, local theater where he is holding his film festival. Even in this setting, the bleeding and coalescing that occurs between the settings is made apparent. The turnout is minimal, and those who do show sequester themselves in the back corner of the room. Viewership may still be associated with the theater and a communal, public space and display, but it is certainly not an overwhelming, interactive experience, and the cordoned viewing experiences of the expanding, fragmented viewing spectrum have not expanded the experience but rather flattened the process of viewership by association.

Once Nathan has created his work he decides he needs the acceptance of the industry community to feel truly safe from accusations of fraud. So, the next level of creating a legitimate work in the film industry is validation from awards. He tries to enter in well-known festivals but is denied so he decides to create his own (all he needs is the title of award-winning film, after all). So, he creates the titular film festival, finds a venue, creates a logo, and finds an industry vet to judge (the second-unit script advisor from Bonnie and Clyde). He also needs competition so he finds a short, unflattering, and repulsive video from YouTube and the festival is set. Nathans film, The Web (which I’m flattering by giving it the prestige of italics) follows (for about 5 minutes) the main character, who is a hacker (Johnny Depp played by Johnny Depp impersonator) operating out of the back of a souvenir shop (Nathan plays his colleague), trying to break the code to login to an asteroid headed for earth that was sent by Bill Gates (another impersonator). Nathan steals away while Johnny hacks to say one last goodbye to his girlfriend. They succeed in the end and earth is saved. At the end of this long, strange trip from marketing consultant to film festival creator, Nathan has defined what is necessary in the modern industry to have a film perceived as legitimate: spectacle, movie stars, narratives (doesn’t have to make sense), and awards, to name a few of the elements touched upon. This description is noticeably removed from the neorealists’ idealism and cahier du cinema writers’ criticisms, and has no interest in catalogues of technique and style by the likes of Rudolf Arnheim or David Bordwell. One might even say it actively affirms the worst postulations of the Frankfurt theorists by stacking layer upon layer of commercialism and manipulation and backing this up with evidence of real consumer behavior.

The response of spectators/consumers in at the bookend of the process is instructive. The patrons revel in the superficialities of the process—the celebrity, the spectacle, the disparate accoutrement—but the experience of the end result is humdrum (due in no small part to the finished product, but still). The contrast is stark and speaks to the potentially unsatisfying, displaced pleasure of modern cinema—as a concept, an idea, a grouping of superficial components and signifiers, that ultimately produce an unfulfilling experience. To paraphrase Dudley Andrew, who asked of Bazin’s conclusions (his optimism even): What would Bazin think of the cinematic formulations/constructions of today? Would his theories dissolve in what film has become? By way of conclusion, perhaps we can consider Nathan not simply as inversely proportional to Bazin, but rather updating Bazin, and his titular question for our modern conception and expectation of cinema. In this way he is perhaps asking exactly the right question to re-square our perspective on the matter—right, in the sense that it reveals changes, inequities, and degradations/devolutions (potentially subjectively) in the medium, but also in that it is perfectly calibrated to express the tenor, attitude, skepticism, and weariness of our modern (postmodern) vantage.

I’ve barely even touched on the film itself, which speaks to the thematic density of the set-up and the notion that the specifics of the work itself are ultimately immaterial and ancillary to most everything else, but there is more to discuss about the actual text, and once it is considered more, additional implications are sure to arise in the context of its creation and exhibition. Additionally, it is worth noting that the very presence of a failing souvenir shop, marginalized from more ideally located, successful operations, speaks to the sheer volume of the consumer industry within the area and within the film and entertainment industry as a whole. There are so many shops and outlets selling the same miniature plastic Oscar statuette that it comprises its own industry and place within the overall scope of the modern-day entertainment experience. Nathan has clearly aimed for the outside fringe of what can be considered “part of the industry” to display the absurdity of its reach. From this perspective, his brazen attempts to minimize, belittle, and define the lowest common denominator could be seen as cleansing and necessary for an unmoored industry seemingly hopelessly displaced from its history and potential. Of course, in all the schemes that Nathan pulls it is easy to forget that he too has his agenda and we too are consuming a piece of entertainment, constructed and crafted to elicit pinpointed responses. It is important not to conflate film and TV but in many ways the two become almost inextricably intertwined within the episode in a way that is explicitly (post)modern. There are many more layers to this onion.