TEDERICK.COM

Team sports

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by

tederick
in

“Be reliable,” he said.

It was fun hawking a relatively trivial personal event on social media in the middle of what was, I joked, the stupidest week in the history of social media. (I’m sure there have been worse ones; but, this one, if you’re in the film industry or adjacent to it in any meaningful way, certainly aimed for the top slot.) I’m taking a breather from the entire online world for the next few days, which I’m privately hoping will stretch to a month or more or perhaps forever. The pandemic paid off both the promise and the threat of social media, and I won’t forget. The promise: when I was sequestered with no one around me for months on end (even this week, a friend asked how I’d managed to endure it), I had instantaneous, multi-channel access to everyone I love, everyone I admire, everyone I’d never heard of but were going through the same thing with me. When awful shit happened and kept happening, I found inspiring means to mobilize my resources and my attention to turn values into practice. In some sky-god’s fever dream of “what the internet should be” might have been, circa 1958, the last two years — at least partially — paid off that promise.

The threat: team sports.

https://twitter.com/tederick/status/1504832901262753818

That quip is a joke, and it’s also not a terribly new insight; but it’s one that I think about constantly (perhaps, especially, in what we could call the Station Eleven era of my thoughts on this). It’s something Price used to talk about on Mamo a lot that I’ve carried with me since then. It’s something Drew McWeeny gets into in this week’s newsletter. Groups of people with common interests can find each other and assemble en masse in a way that simply was not possible before 50 years ago, and I don’t think we’ve really taken a beat to consider how fundamentally different that is from the basic tenets of social and communal interaction for, literally, the entire rest of humanity’s time on this planet. Especially (as above) when it comes to the fringier types — you think two weirdos who think masks are regurgitating carbon dioxide into their lungs at a rate more dangerous than any potential exposure to covid-19, would even have known each other existed in the 5th century? Fuck no. One of them would have been in Belgium and the other one in Kent.

Leaving aside the “Flu Trux Klan” of it all, there’s also the team sports awfulness that has all but destroyed every fandom I am a part of (which Drew discusses in his piece above). There’s the wider team sports awfulness that has all but destroyed the relevance of the Oscars — which Cameron Bailey touches on, in his op-ed here (paywalled) — which, sure, perhaps are due to be destroyed anyway. But connecting the evangelicalism that Drew mentions with the anti-“Oscar movie” undercurrents of not just fringe culture but mainstream culture that Cameron discusses, with the overall anti-intellectual, anti-journalism, anti-science, anti-art THING that the internet has in large part fully mobilized in the past ten or fifteen years… and it sure starts to sound like we are giving birth to a society without a soul.

And on the Oscars, specifically: woof. Even without the incident(s) of violence, that was a humiliating experience for the Academy and its industry, and those of us who actually give a shit about any of this (“this” being “movies,” of any flavour, and yes that includes you, MCU). Nakedly dismissive of craft, appallingly cruel to its elders and its history (both the Lifetime Achievement Award winners, and those members of the industry who died in 2021), and the first time that I have been aware of where the show felt closer to D23 than a (theoretically) pan-studio effort at celebrating the whole industry. We may simply have come to the end of the line on this thing; no one wants to sit in on a trade show by and for some of the wealthiest and prettiest people on the planet, especially when all those wealthy pretty people share their carefully-manicured “behind the scenes” lives with us on Insta and TikTok anyway. Celebrities are no longer fascinating (if they ever were); they’re vulgar, and now heading towards creepy. If the Oscars have cut the other side out of the deal — the part where they celebrate degrees of high quality of craft — then there’s nothing left. The Oscars need to go.

A relatively trivial personal event

So: that’s that, Fury Road-wise. Everyone, from the event staff to the audience to that whacko who introduced me, was incredibly kind, and it was so much fun to catch up with friends and total strangers at the book signing afterwards.

And I was nervous, man. Nervous like I almost never am when faced with public speaking (at least, not since the fifth grade). My friends at TBLB will tell you that I spent most of the day wandering aimlessly on the 5th floor, looking for things to distract me. I don’t have a good theory on why I was so up in my feelings about the whole thing except perhaps the obvious one: for better or worse, timing and happenstance and pandemic having worked out the way they did, this was basically the end of the (fury) road for this thing — the thing where I wrote a book — a process that started just shy of seven years ago. As I watched the film — on beautiful, scratchy, 35mm film!! — I spent more than a few moments thinking about how much change in my own life, but probably more importantly in my sense of self, values, and behaviours, those seven years have spanned.

I spent the rest of the moments just goggling at the film, because wow, that is a film. As involving and overwhelming as it was the first time I laid eyes on it.

Be Reliable was damned hard to write — probably also contributing to my nerves, as I only finished it the day before I said it — and I realized when I got home and posted the text that it was because it really probably is the last thing I’m ever going to write about this movie. (I mean, who knows. Maybe.) I wrote a couple of backmatter pieces for higher-level Kickstarter supporters, and now this; and I think this is probably the summary argument. I’m on to a couple of other writing projects now on top of my day job, and the Furiosa movie’s going to come out soon and I’ll probably read Kyle Buchanan’s book, and my whole relationship with Fury Road will begin to change into something else. But it happened. I wrote my book.

That’s mad, man. What a mad thing to have done. Witness.

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