Calculated to Bamboozle

Just watched the winning Tropfest film, "Bamboozled". Weird. I mean, I know gag films always dominate at Tropfest. That's partly a function of the voting structure, where a winning film has to appeal to all of the panellists. Short films can't reliably tell an intricate story, there isn't time. What they can do is either be experimental in structure, or offer a gag. And the thing about experimental films is that they polarise - some will love them, some will hate them. But the gag films reliably "work". They don't feel too short, they don't feel too weird - they achieve a modest objective, successfully. So the fact that a film with this particular structure won is no surprise.

What's weird for me is that the gag is (for my money) poorly executed. They over-labour the punchline, which drags on for almost 2 minutes, while they explain that there's a reality tv show, that he's on it, that his girlfriend was involved etc. The first 3 seconds after the big reveal are more than enough to let the audience nut out the gist of the punchline - more than that and the filmmaker becomes a drunk uncle at a wedding, constantly repeating a bad joke because he thinks you didn't get it. If they wanted a sharper punchline, they needed to find a way to plant the existence of the "Bamboozled" show, or at least the idea of reality TV more generally, or the suggestion he mistreated his ex, or something, so that the big reveal could be shorter, sharper, and punchier. It's also an ugly shift in tone and aesthetic, after an elegant montage we go to choppy handheld.

It also doesn't feel like the prestige corresponds with the pledge and turn - we build up a story about acceptance and connection, about possible fluidity of sexuality and gender identity, and so forth, and then the twist is that he was lied to. But the lie wasn't by that point the foundation of their connection, the connection was confusing and confronting to the protagonist, but it wasn't very elegantly turned on its head in the denouement.

It was rather like the "Knock Knock" jokes children tell before they've mastered the format. "Knock knock." "Who's there?" "Phillip." "Phillip who?" "Dog farts!!"

The other tricksy thing is the play of sympathies. We get drawn in by the bewildered, hesitant acceptance of the protagonist in the first part. He wins us over by being open-minded but not gullible, and by having an ex who seems to remember him fondly. No fatal flaw is established - we learn very little about him which is negative until *after* the big reveal, and too late for us to have time to reorient our sympathies. The regret after the night before is a dick move, but ultimately his prerogative (anyone's allowed to regret sex) and he's building up to a way to gently step back when the *big loud noises* trigger his fight-or-flight response and leave him acting poorly. But because the ending is so contrived and disconnected, it's all just very emotionally alienating.

Oh, and I should perhaps also mention it's likely to distress GLBTQAI and pretty much the rest of the alphabet. Others will grapple with those aspects better than I.

On Budget Black Holes

Now listen here. About all this business concerning "Budget black holes", can both sides of politics and all of the media just stop it? It's a bad, inaccurate metaphor which makes me all cross and shouty.

First of all, a black hole is not an absence. It is an enormously dense concentration of matter, creating a gravity well so intense the ordinary laws of physics don't apply. Not a "nothing," but profoundly and irretrievably a "something". The "blackness" is a property of the fact that it's so dense that not even light can escape.

A black hole is not, fundamentally, a "hole" in the traditional sense. Holes can be filled. Indeed, that is what each side of politics proposes to do with its opponent's (comparatively modest, really) "Budget black hole". If it really was a black hole though, you couldn't ever make it go away by throwing stuff at it. This could only add to its supermass. Indeed, "filling" a black hole would make it larger, denser and more inescapable.

Black holes also drag matter into themselves. Indeed, one assumes this is the appeal of the metaphor, for the charlatans who use it. It introduces a sense of urgency, as the black hole will surely only get deeper and blacker until it consumes us all in an apocalyptic melange of undead Sam Neill and Aerosmith nuking Bruce Willis.

But a Budget black hole doesn't do this. It's a mathematical puzzle with a finite solution. It's shortfall to be dealt with, now or later, by any number of compensating adjustments. The urgency of doing so depends on plenty of factors, most of which have nothing to do with its size. It is (if you really must) a hole. A gap, not an apocalypse. Not a black hole, just a hole.

On Nice Guys of OKCupid

My goodness there’s a lot of sound and fury surrounding Nice Guys of OKCupid. These people and these people and these people raise excellent points, and I can even recommend the comments. I’m also mindful of this (admittedly modest) study about the miscommunications, misunderstandings and other social slapstick surrounding platonic friendships. If you don’t know what NGOOKC looks like, it goes a little something like this:

A big part of online dating is triage. Making the connections you want, and avoiding those you don’t. Those who want different things, those who want you for reasons contrary to your interests, those looking to fill a vacancy you don’t have. Given the gender disparities in number of unsolicited messages received, this aspect of online dating disproportionately concerns women, but men consider it as well.

Another big part is self-branding – an online dating resumé to put yourself out there, to sell yourself by emphasising (within the margins of honesty) your finer qualities. And yes, of course “nice” is a minimum standard and nothing to brag about, but this is an application – criteria must be met, boxes must be checked, coffee must be earned.

These purposes inform the composition of most online dating profiles. They’re a trope of the genre. But in the instance of NGOOKC, they clash. They operate at cross-purposes and present a discordant impression. A self at odds with itself. In one breath the author seeks to answer the vague implied criteria for the partner he has not yet identified, and in the next he makes an impassioned plea for understanding in a cold, anonymous online wasteland. The two collide. Also, he is ugly and can’t spell (misspelling being the e-profile equivalent of an unsightly birth defect), and worthy of shame for both of those characteristics. Mustn’t forget that.

The Nice Guys of OKCupid rather reminds me of an application I made to a job which chiefly involved fast-paced proofreading. My resumé accordingly waxed lyrical on the virtues of my attention to detail, and it was only after receiving a reply email that I noticed, in my brief cover letter, a stonking great big typo. The studious, meticulous man of letters I had constructed was undone at a keystroke, and I was by no means above altering history in the copies of the original letter attached to subsequent correspondence in case it hadn’t yet been seen (it worked – I work there today). I’m sure there could be an equally diverting blog compiling typos in eager resumés which boast of “attention to detail”.

In both my application and NGOOKC, the discord comes from cross-purposes. For me, (barring more Freudian interpretations of my mistake) it was my haste to pull myself out of debt, to be employed, juxtaposed with my desire to make a good impression. For the nice guys, it’s the desire to make a good impression juxtaposed with the desire to choose the right match for them.

It’s not that I have a lot of sympathy for the self-professed “nice guy”. The view of sex as something to be earned by levelling up his NGP (Nice Guy Points) is fairly grotesque, whether held by a misguided beta male, a more straightforwardly misogynist twit or indeed a rather mercenary woman (a corresponding blog shaming “nice” women might be a volatile concoction – the pre-emptive “triaging” tends to require a harsher tone to slow the deluge of the often besieged female profile). Sex as currency can be a problem. There’s nothing wrong, however, with wanting sex, with or without friendship (maybe they already have enough IRL, meatverse friends – managing the number of friends you keep is a familiar concept to anyone who has deleted excess Facebook friends). There’s nothing wrong with using an online dating profile to say as much. It’s actually a highly appropriate place – it isn’t the workplace, a dark alley or a subway car. Some of our nice guys don’t want to be “friendzoned”, which is an odious and sexist term and which (so the argument goes) presupposes that our nice guys only befriend women in the eventual hope of sex. No doubt this is sometimes the case. But there’s a friendlier reading. Perhaps they only wish to sleep with people who matter to them, with people they know well. With friends.

Sure it may be more intellectually honest to declare sexual desire at the outset like so much duty-free liquor, but there are 2 problems – firstly, desire can flourish and blossom as the friendship does, and secondly, eliding the references to footwear in “nice shoes, wanna fuck?” has a negative success rate (you actually unhave sex you’ve already had, somehow). Some nice guys are struggling in vain to date online in an intellectually honest way, to enact the lonely highschooler's mantra that It Gets Better.

But then, many of them are just dicks.