On Going Nowhere, Fast
The low-key joy of being stuck in a vitality-consuming doughnut of absolutely nothing.
Let me tell you about the time that I lost my house keys at Blockbuster Video and never got them back.
From 2006 to about 2009 or 2010 I had what seemed like a compulsion to go to Blockbuster. It was like a switch went off in my brain by a certain time on Friday night, usually after dinner, to make the trek to the next town where the nearest franchise was. It had gotten to such a point that the clerk I saw the most eventually went into pitch mode. “I see you here a lot,” he said, “so you might as well sign up and get some benefits.” He was talking about a customer “loyalty” program that would confer “rewards” the more I used it. His persuasion worked, and after giving some perfunctory data I was issued a small plastic card that would monitor my status. At some point in my membership, the keys to which the card was chained got separated from me. Blockbuster was the last time I remember seeing them.
My membership card was attached alongside a small, shiny whiskey bottle keychain I’d been given at a work event around that time. So my house keys had a distinct look that could easily be described and retrieved had I lost them there and had they been found. (And, sure, probably not a lot of people are dumb enough to lose their fucking keys at a video store.) But I put off calling for whatever reason. Then Blockbuster went out of business, so I’d never know, and then the door of my house was replaced, so it didn’t matter.
I was never known for my accurate sense of cultural timing. Sometimes I was very early, most times I was very late; but in this rare instance the planets had aligned perfectly. The future that played out in the late-‘00s was very different from the future that plays out in the early-‘20s. It was a very Philip K. Dick kind of future; but literary Philip K. Dick not cinematic Philip K. Dick, where cumbersome devices served limited practical ends but many psychic ends. A community based around corporate loyalty and incentive is something Dick might have appreciated. Few save the most stringent coupon hawks could say with any exactitude what rewards if any they reaped from their loyalty memberships, but doubtless all felt less alone or adrift while doing so.
“Adrift” was one thing you could feel regularly if you were a certain age and in the late-‘00s. For much of that time, adrift was probably the worst it got. There was something very static about the late-‘00s. But it wasn’t the dissonant, roaring static of finding a signal, it was more the ambient, crackling static heard in-between voices. Not that a voice could be heard. People in the late-‘00s were speaking to nothing, from a frequency that was nowhere.
Nowhere is something that is at once widely disparaged and hard to describe before you’re there. Though once there, you know it when you see it, and it is disparaged even harder. I hesitate, however, to call nowhere a place, or even an absence of place. Think of nowhere as a state—a state of exhaustion—or maybe a void. No one goes out in search of nowhere. No one knows where nowhere is, and if someone claims to know where nowhere is, they’ve wildly misconstrued the concept and are possibly in need of help. Nowhere is somewhere you just end up for lack of anywhere else. Choices bring you there; so does bad luck. Sometimes, though, nowhere has a way of finding you.
For me it was a bit of both. I graduated from college into nowhere. In fact, nowhere seemed to be waiting to take me in. Not that I was conscious that it was “nowhere,” it seemed more like “anticlimax.” The concept of a future, let alone a promising future, seemed to dissolve into a kind of mist. Everything was at a standstill; no one was interested in going forward and those who were didn’t know how. It was a low-key, “let’s just ride this out” era, a “the surged worked” era, an “I’m voting for John Edwards” era. Almost nothing was good. At best they were fine.
The lack of goodness came across in my choice of video rentals. Forgotten, perhaps, in a cultural sense, they’ve nonetheless become stuck in my memory as a reliable plug for the vortex of nothing swirling all around me like a vitality-consuming doughnut at the time. That seems strange to say given what they were: direct-to-DVD schlock, running on the fumes of a mid-decade horror boom where gruesome violence (Hostel, Saw, and a bunch of unhinged French films), unevenly translated Asian tech-horror (The Ring, Pulse, One Missed Call), and badly translated Spanish gothic (Darkness) evinced at least modest profitability. These films were self-consciously cut-rate, thrown out into the market, itself a kind of void, with a bored, half-sophisticated audience in mind, who moreover had no time, interest, or funds for planting themselves in a theater.
Eli Roth held the most aesthetic sway at the time with his fusion of Quentin Tarantino and Herschell Gordon Lewis. The resulting knock-offs include the suffocatingly earnest and grossly wrongheaded high school revenge film The Final; a couple of Deliverance knock-offs like Eden Lake and Turistas, noted mostly for starring Michael Fassbender and Olivia Wilde respectively; a slew of dour paranormal films like Fragile and The Abandoned trying, quixotically, to replicate the aura of Guillermo del Toro’s cult hit The Devil’s Backbone. And this was all before Paranormal Activity came and reordered everyone’s priorities for nearly a decade.
It was a period defined by low stakes and lower expectations. Finding bright spots was something of a roulette game. The feminist (and vaguely sex negative) horror comedy Teeth has achieved deserved longevity, managing all of the satire that Roth could never reach and with half the violence. Lake Mungo takes the found footage/mockumentary gimmick and weaves a methodical mystery with a meditation on loss; its scares are spare but lasting. From Within is a solid idea executed well enough, with a fine, but brief, Jared Harris performance. Not only did I watch Human Centipede, I defended it in public to people who, at that point, respected my opinion and took pleasure in my company. I don’t regret it because I hardly remember anything about it. But even these mostly redeemable films got pulled back under the morass out of which they came. For something that’s nothing, nowhere has an irresistible gravitational force.
This paints an incomplete picture, to be sure. Horror movie marathoning was not the only thing that happened in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere can have a vast reach. I made frequent trips to Brooklyn, walking along block after block of empty warehouses in Williamsburg to get to a “loft” where troves of hipsters of the “Dos and Don’ts”-era-of-Vice variety partied to terrible music and pitched their never-realized projects to each other. It left me with the (extremely generous) impression that this once-coveted marketing demographic was energetic and ambitious but insular and distracted. Somewhere in there I saw Mastodon, then I saw Radiohead, and I found it impossible to ignore Animal Collective. I amassed an extensive library of advanced review copies of CDs for “fresh” talent that I’ve mostly forgotten. Be Your Own Pet made us all feel like extras on their very own Josie and the Pussycats before disappearing. I think the singer sells tie-dyed goods now. I worked for several places where I really didn’t fit in, getting paid in “exposure.” I grew a beard. I interviewed Moby. And if there was one solid fact of that era it was that Moby is extremely, unabashedly Moby.
I had a lot of energy in the middle of nowhere. Maybe I just thrive in nowhere. With little or nothing provided from without, the responsibility to provide comes from within. You have the burden and the blessing to make a lot of mistakes in nowhere trying to get just about anywhere. Nowhere feels like a holding pattern going in endless circles but in truth it is a slow buildup and, almost without noticing and in spite of itself, nowhere is nowhere to be seen.
Such as when the zeros became the teens and modern horror had gone into its pimply but promising adolescence. The genre had come once again to embrace something approaching ambition. Even while budgets were minimal, ideas were many and potent. Ti West broke out in 2009 with a film that literally goes nowhere for most of its runtime and used it to unnerving but rewatchable effect. His adolescence would be longer than others, but the threshold was set with him. Drag Me to Hell came out the same year, Insidious came out in 2010, Kill List in 2011, Sinister in 2012, The Conjuring in 2013, then the indies (and “indies”) took over from 2014 onward.
This is not to say that, as horror gained prestige, so did my existence. (How simpler life would be if it followed the easy rhythm of horror’s Boethian wheel.) The situation had simply changed. I found myself freed of the limitations of physical inventory of all kinds. I had more opportunity to leave nowhere behind and to head out into … somewhere else. Is somewhere better? It is certainly different. The enveloping doughnut vortex becomes the winding labyrinth, filled with distractions. Even if those distractions are edifying, it places isolate impulses like contemplation and imagination on a lower rung of value. Why live in your own head when you’re somewhere doing something?
There are aspects of going nowhere that I don’t want to repeat. I don’t want the bouncing-ball mania that immediately precedes the drying cement lethargy. I don’t want to revisit my desperation to connect with anyone that really fucked up my ability to make sound decisions. I don’t want the insecurity of losing while I’m ahead, or the fear of being wrong or out of step. In general, I’d rather leave the last gasps of youthful confusion with the last gasps of my youth. Of course that confusion doesn’t dissipate with age. It fattens and grows hair out of its ears as you do. But there are things I lost that, like my house keys, aren’t coming back.
Even if the choices in front of me were substandard, I did not feel deprived by them. Maybe because it wasn’t that bad. I did have Sundance Channel (which I dearly miss) to offer some unpredictable selections of refinement. But I was still in a position where I had to develop some manner of cultural and cerebral self-sufficiency if my brain power was not to be wasted. As such, I grew into someone who is ill at ease at the prospect of being provided for1. I’d prefer not to be fed processed culture, whether by digital or personal curation, that demands (expects, really) no additional thought from me. That is the trap of Peak Culture, the braindead surrender to sparkle that’s confused with substance.
The young do not ask me for advice and I’m not in the habit, let alone the business, of giving them any. My capacity does not extend beyond hope. I hope that they will not make themselves sick with adventure or mournful at the impossible quest to reach out and touch everything and everyone and to call that “experience.” I hope instead that they are broadened by their limitations. I hope that they are set free by what chokes them. I hope they are going nowhere, fast. I hope the nowhere into which they go has a void of a sufficiently depthless yawn. Mostly I hope that they don’t cross with the Devil on a moonlit road and leave it with a customer loyalty card.
Culturally and intellectually, that is. In most important, real-life respects I am woefully useless and dependent.
Saving this to revisit, but I have a long, long Blockbuster story I'll get out sooner rather than later, and it feels like it's the other half of this one - identical experience, polar opposite in terms of location, same floating into nothing-ness down to the choice of rentals. Let me know if it's okay to share this.