Why So Serious?
Happy April. This is the sixteenth issue of Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit — it’s just like all those other email newsletters, except nobody’s laughing.
Last month’s newsletter was a real bummer about how capitalism’s insatiable appetite for growth is fueling engagement metrics and driving society right off a cliff. So let’s change things up and make this month’s newsletter a bummer about how real life has become so absurd, every day feels like a practical joke. Fun!
I pity the fool
April Fools’ Day so close to Easter Sunday seems like some kind of gag all by itself. (I’m dead! Just kidding!) But even this dumb holiday (which I think I’ve disliked as far back as grade school) has become a sign o’ the times.
It used to be that April 1 was one of the worst days on the Internet because you had to treat everything you saw online as terrible and untrustworthy. Even big brands were out there conspiring to fool the press and the public into talking about their company’s w-w-wild and k-k-krazy ideas. (I won’t link to any examples of cringey brand behavior because that’s just what they want us to do!)
Possibly the best corporate joke was on April 1, 2004, when Google launched Gmail, because back in the good ol’ days of the Internet our puny imaginations, hobbled by the limits of Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, were unable to comprehend 1GB of free storage as anything but a joke. A whole gigabyte! How could I possibly ever use that!
But nowadays, with dismal absurdity reigning over the Internet 365 days a year, it seems like April Fools’ has finally lost its punch. I mean, how do you top this kind of thing as far as stretching the limits of credulity? It’s not funny, but the joke’s on us, anyway.
Scam or right-wing political campaign?
How’s this for a new kind of misery, one that only modern life can provide: For the last couple of weeks I’ve been receiving a couple of text messages a day promoting Dumbass for president.
Either my phone number has been added to a Republican mailing list or these texts are scams/phishing attempts. Since I can’t be sure, I dare not reply to them with “STOP” in order to remove myself from the list, because for all I know, I’d just be confirming that their spam has reached a living, breathing human and the texting would just get worse. So, it’s “Delete and Report as Junk,” and I move on with the day.
But today, the political texts were even more batshit crazy than usual.
Scams? April Fools’ jokes? Legitimate conservative talking points? It’s literally impossible to tell the difference.
Anyway, the days are getting (mildly) warmer, and there’s real baseball on the TV. So, let’s count our blessings and enjoy our chocolate bunnies and little bits of fun while we can. The election is still a spring and summer away.
Other rabbit holes
Kindergarten Cop. Let’s make all the rabbit holes movie holes this month. Here’s an April Fools’ joke by the Criterion Collection that deserves five gold stars.
“One day you’ll barter bread for our DVDs.” This is how much of an old man I’m becoming: I agree with almost every sentiment in this article about people who are doubling-down on physical media.
David Bordwell RIP. David Bordwell was a film scholar who taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and wrote a great heap of books about cinema, many of them with his wife, Kristin Thompson. They also wrote a great blog about movies together. He died last month after a long illness. This is a nice tribute by film critic Matt Zoller Seitz. Bordwell was not famous — more of film critic’s film critic — but he made a deep impact on cinema just the same. I discovered him relatively recently, coinciding with my discovery of Ozu’s movies about seven years ago. (Ebert: “Sooner or later, everyone who loves movies comes to Ozu.”) When I rewatched Ozu’s Autumn Afternoon with Bordwell’s audio commentary, it kind of blew me away — revealing so much about what the director was doing and how he was doing it, deepening my appreciation of every moment and every shot. Bordwell’s book about Ozu — Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, long out of print, is a treasure for me. I should link to something he wrote: here he is giving a little bit of side-eye to Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Like I said, Bordwell left behind a great mountain of books to study, and I also look forward to digging into his series on the Criterion Channel. But it is still sad to see such a passionate, critical mind — no one seems to look at movies the way he did — disappear.
And that’s it for this month’s edition. Have a good one.
jf