Viral Voyeurism: How Nathan Fielder’s “How To with John Wilson” Predicts Our World
Throughout New York City, John Wilson shot thousands of short, candid clips. These are bite-sized scraps of moving fabric that feel right at home in our 21st century virtual world of attention zapping scroll stoppers.
The guilty glee of watching a dressed down Kyle MacLachlan, of Twin Peaks fame, swipe a tapped out subway card a half-dozen times in a row before bowing his head in defeat, or the mock props paid a hooded stranger who casually struts across a busy intersection with a miniature dog perched atop his head, are reason enough to keep watching. These scenes might be memes in themselves. But something more ambitious is at work in HBO’s How To with John Wilson.
John Wilson sews his stock footage into a discomfiting quilt. Many of his observations are muted, in tone but also literally; their sound has been removed and replaced by a melancholic score under Wilson’s lispy monotone. Objects and consumer products feature as frequently as actual human beings. Occasionally, skits are arranged from scratch from whatever is handy at Wilson’s apartment or hotel room to move the “plot” forward, but for the most part real life occurrences predominate.
Whether Wilson is taxonomizing street-corner minutiae like the quick-goodbye “touch and go” observed between small groups of acquaintances when one person wants to stop talking and walk away, or pulling awkward but innocuous pranks like springing anti-vax talk at the Apple store, the goal is observation, not interference.
By capturing a Men’s Warehouse sales-clerk snap-back to formality after Wilson mentions a court date the following day for ‘manslaughter,’ he recalls the robot agility which characterizes the titular virus in Walker Percy’s final novel, The Thanatos Syndrome. Percy’s story, in which a nefarious government conspiracy targets a town’s population and reduces them to sex-crazed apes with uncanny powers of calculation and fact regurgitation, is a critique of Google-spurred degeneracy before such a thing existed. But unlike the concerned protagonist of Percy’s story, who unearths an elite pedophilia ring at the nexus of evil, Wilson moves zombielike through his world as if he’s as much in its thrall as anybody, opening doors at random onto bowling alleys, Star Wars light saber battles, and monochromatic cityscapes.
Flourishes of morbidity, like a paramedic crew’s fumbling of a sheeted corpse on a stretcher down a city stoop, or a sequence of shots in which a blood-soaked sweater is bagged and tagged by a police detail, pass by with only oblique punning references to theme, as in the “forensics” of relationships. New images of fur-suited pedestrians or wheelchair bound mannequins swiftly move into focus and change the mood before there is time for it to settle.
Apart from the flurry of miscellany, interviews with collaborating strangers are paced throughout, lending some structure, but with no narrative connection other than a shared sense of desperation, loneliness, and bizarrity. The net effect of John Wilson’s show might suggest an alien scientist sent to earth to study human behavior were the behavior on display not so uniformly out of whack, equal parts absurd and menacing.
Scenes captured away from NYC, at an MTV and Monster Energy Drink sponsored debauch on Cancun beach, consume the second half of Wilson’s first episode, along with his engagement with a friendless pothead named Chris. A fellow traveller amid the sea of flexing beach bods, Chris, whose good friend’s recent suicide spurred his trip south of the border, speaks in guarded, short sentences. His account and demeanor strike the right balance between loneliness and detachment.
But an earlier escapade, into Amish country, with a tattooed wrestling fanatic who snares pedophiles for his day job by way of long text exchanges, impersonating a sexually precocious 15-year-old boy, hits closer to Wilson’s main theme of disconnect. Shortly before Wilson’s pedo-fighting acquaintance is about to hit the trails, their target calls off the rendezvous. Typical, the goateed bounty hunter seems to grunt. He’s been through this before. In Wilson’s depiction of the world, a sin like pedophilia is too boldly interpersonal to proceed as planned. Instead we’re back where we started: Alone.
Viewers familiar with Executive Producer Nathan Fielder’s 2019 Emmy Award Winning Comedy Central show, Nathan For You, will be primed to take Wilson’s blend of Millennial malaise and Zoomer humor in stride. But whereas Fielder’s show was a hilarious critique of the hollow promises and vapid corporate attitudes exposed by the 2008 financial crisis, Wilson’s show predicts our post-COVID world, in which mandatory face-coverings don’t just insert themselves as a necessary health protocol, but figure in the popular imagination as a tyrannical form of enforced anonymity and depersonalization.
Nathan For You showcased carefully engineered, preposterous business deals, and Nathan was its star, a Canadian business school graduate with “really good grades” who stood mercilessly deadpan through the hushed silences of one painfully awkward encounter after another. With a seemingly infinite supply of cash, Nathan convinced desperate craigslisters to change their legal name, exchange burner cellphones for cash in a discarded McDonalds cup, and sign away the right to their own DNA for “cloning purposes.” Heist-quality strategies toward the absurdly benign end of generating business for hot dog stands, antique stores, and other small fledgling American businesses highlighted the incredible contrast between entrepreneurial aspirations and endemic levels of naïveté. In each episode, the goal was to sand the veneer of a business owner’s professional self down to the level of their real and personal concerns, and if the results weren’t always funny, they were at least impressively painful to watch.
How To with John Wilson triggers less of a cringe response because its protagonist never risks significant social friction. Even at his most provocative, Wilson’s interactions with others are fleeting, and are relegated to a kind of collective short-term memory loss. Wilson embraces flakiness because he isn’t interested in scrutinizing modern day business best practice. Instead he wants to meaningfully riff on the DIY tutorial ethos, the let’s-Google-that zeitgeist of a “How-To” society that demands solutions to situations you can’t afford to not fix yourself.
Nathan For You showed us what one man could do with a MacBook Pro, but the device closer to Wilson’s art is the iPhone, which can be flipped on at any moment to record nearly anything at all in high definition. There is a growing tension between the passivity that smartphone addiction induces, and the weight of expectation placed on the phone as an “anything device,” a skeleton key for all locks and a long-range leverage extender that can move the world. The terrain that Nathan Fielder navigated with such gusto is giving way to something less formal, as professional life goes fully remote and former career tracks get supplanted by online tutorials.
To show us the burgeoning world of dislocated people in displaced roles, John Wilson doesn’t need to show his face, and it works better that way. Instead, his perpetually outward-facing camera resembles the perspective of first person shooters, viral twitter videos, and body-cam footage. We’ve been with this style of filming for a long time, it’s just never been incorporated so thoroughly into a budgeted, major network TV show.
The comedic precursor to Wilson’s point-of-view style is Channel 4s Peep Show, a ludicrously crass 21st century update of The Odd Couple, in which terminally single long-term roommates Jeremy and Mark toggle perspectives back and forth through London, concocting relationship after relationship and hijinks after hijinks. Peep Show is also a little like Jeeves and Wooster on Viagra, and its success serves as evidence that a societal inversion of roles has reached completion. In a world where traditional hierarchical relations between masters and butlers have broken down (Mark, the mild-mannered history nerd, would be the Jeeves of the two), marriage to a woman, which in a bygone era loomed as a dangerously alluring threat to a man’s independence, now stands for quite the opposite: a deliriously sought after but unattainable goal, elusive under the best of circumstances, despite rapid and frequent coitus.
But an older British production, the similarly titled and Criterion-released Peeping Tom, is the original cinematic predecessor to John Wilson’s solipsistic vantage point. Shot in 1960 in gorgeously saturated technicolor, Peeping Tom is an uncanny British analogue to Hitchock’s Psycho, featuring a soft-spoken and disturbed German photographer who films the deaths of the women he murders with a retractable dagger beneath his camera lens. Peeping Tom was critically censured for upsetting public scruples, not because the carnage itself shocked, but because Mark, the madman behind the camera-dagger, equal parts Norman Bateman and Jimmy Stewart, was portrayed as so dementedly sensitive and even artistically gifted with his particular fetish for death. Peeping Tom was a masterpiece of dread too dreadful for critics to master.
Peeping Tom’s subject was voyeurism and the voyeur, much like Hitchcock’s earlier, less violent classic, Rear Window. Hitchcock’s depiction of the voyeur as a house-bound, broken-legged photographer who discovers a murder by way of a telescope has long served film critics as a kind of grand metaphor for cinema as a whole. At its loftiest, cinema promises to cast us in roles like that of Hitchcock’s homespun detective, who investigates the crime of his neighbor from behind the safety of a lens—signifying the screen, our window into the lives of others—and is ultimately able to bring a criminal to justice. Despite the initial safety of his perch, Stuart’s character is discovered by the movie’s villain toward the end of the story, and Stuart must “fall to earth” from his all-seeing tower, entering once again the world beyond his window pane—the world, that is, beyond the screen.
Movie-making has long clung to a somewhat dubious but hard-fought reputation as a socially respectable and responsible undertaking. But the disproportionate role that celebrities have felt it their place to assume in political affairs is suspicious. Being trained in the art of pretend, actors are natural politicians, and several prominent ones have made the career move to Washington. Like contorted facial expression held long enough to stick, actors sometimes can’t shake the conviction that, just like in the movies, they are our heroes and saviors—People Who Matter. And indeed, the line between fantasy and reality blurs further in a world where ubiquitous videocamera access turns anyone with the will to become one into a miniature celebrity in the pocket-sized theater of social media.
The productions of Nathan Fielder, whether he’s in them or not, show us a farcical version of the parable of the voyeur, and one more in line with Peeping Tom than Rear Window, whereby audiovisual technology becomes a tool of destruction, a way of documenting the death of something rather than righting social wrongs. Rear Window gave us the original social justice warrior, while Peeping Tom shows us the SJW’s hidden motivation: to cancel others through an act of virtual murder. The peppering references to death and dead bodies throughout How To with John Wilson reinforce this point, but his entire carousel of slides center on death, be it literal or figurative, not just of human beings but of aesthetics, manners, and communal experiences.
In 1960, the portable videocamera was a novelty, and identifying it with an impaling implement seemed needlessly grotesque. But the decision to portray cinema as a destructive force becomes more intelligible in light of Peeping Tom’s conclusion, where it is revealed that Mark, while videotaping his victims’ final moments, also positions a mirror in front of their faces, so that they are forced to watch their own death throes. His dagger is the original selfie stick. Mark confesses, finally, that the murder footage is being used to complete his father’s scientific research on the human fear response—an encyclopedic set in need of only one final volume. Mark’s childhood, we learn, served as his father’s primary laboratory, in which Mark was constantly filmed undergoing a laundry list of humiliating tests and trials. Hence the unusual, cohabiting duality of Mark’s cruel and sensitive sides; he has learned how to torture others, but also what it means to truly suffer.
Surveillance technology threatens to affect everyone the way Mark’s father’s research affected him, by turning us into social predators who virtually murder each other with the sword and buckler of camera and screen. And our justification for doing so is our own outrage, the fact that someone hurt us too. Younger, more cut off generations, who can’t remember a virtual apparatus that wasn’t eagerly poised to capture their worst and most embarrassing slips, have responded by further retreating from the tangible world and into the belly of the beast. Social anxiety results in a desire for anonymity, and the consequence of anonymity is further social breakdown, and anxiety.
Further along the road to perdition traced by Jeremy and Mark, the season finale of Nathan For You predicts where sexual evolution ultimately leads by zeroing in on Nathan’s infatuation with a high-end escort. After four seasons of throwing money at people whose failing business models precluded any effective conquest, despite Nathan’s stupendous efforts, of their approval, Nathan finally touched on the one business where love itself is the product— prostitution, a.k.a. the oldest profession on earth.
The poignant but satirical, Disney Movie finisher of Nathan for You, where a drone-hitched camera lifts away from the professionally contracted lovebirds, leaves us in suspense. Without a show and a multi-million dollar budget to support another tête-à-tête with the soft-handed Maci, will their relationship survive? Nathan’s own shaky business model is exposed after his craving for love overrides the pragmatic dictates of a viewing public. The winking nod to the audience suggests that Nathan, just like his clients, was selling something fundamentally fake all along: Success. If professional success is just a kind of counterfeit currency, something everyone wants but that can’t be exchanged for admiration and love, how do you attain it. Roll credits; this is the farthest staring at a screen can take you.
How To with John Wilson shows us what might come next, but for the most part we’re already living it. Alienation, division, spectacles of decay. If the love Nathan Fielder was after is real, and it can survive all that, it must not have been what he first thought it was—strategic, manipulative, greedy. All that’s just business. Proverbially, one might say love is patient, and cynics could retort, “Yeah, a mental patient.” Both might be true. Go find out for yourself.