I Just Read About That…

[WATCHED: October 10, 2012] Close Personal Friend

While I was browsing Coupland’s bibliography on Wikipedia I saw this movie: Douglas Coupland: Close Personal Friend.  There is no information on Coupland’s site about it and there is precious little information about it anywhere else, frankly.  However, it has been uploaded to YouTube!

It’s a 24 minute film made for commercial TV.  It was made in 1996 and is very much of that time.  I’m not sure if Coupland was working on Girlfriend in a Coma at the time, but ideas in the film inform that book as well.

Basically it has Coupland, looking very clean-cut and smart–suit, skinny tie, hair parted hard–sitting in a white chair (a rounded chair that swivels–very “futuristic” looking).  He is sitting in front of  a white  background so his chair disappears from time to time (I’m willing to accept that that could just be the effect of a poor video transfer though).

There is an interviewer who asks him puffball questions, because it’s basically a chance for Coupland to talk about the his views of the late nineties and the future.  For instance: Do you consider yourself a citizen of the late 20th century?  (That’s just a weird question).  She asks him what the two dominant activities will be 20 years from now (which would be 2016).  His answer? Going shopping and going to jail.   Not too far off.

Coupland has always been concerned with the future (or more specifically, the millennium–I’m not sure how he has wrapped his head around the 21st century).  As I mentioned about his short story yesterday, he is very like-minded with Vonnegut about the state of humanity as we reach the millennium.   So he talks about lot of different topics including: individuality (and how we have lost it–he talks about a flock of birds seeing a group of people and finding them indistinguishable); the idea of not having a life–this was interesting, because as he points out even 20 years ago (1976), that expression would have been meaningless; consumerism; the uselessness of pop culture (how reading about Burt and Loni uses brain cells that could have been used to cure cancer).  And how technology can dehumanize us.

I never realized such a closeness with some of Vonnegut’s ideas until I read them so close together.  Hocus Pocus and Timequake both have the same basic idea at their heart as Coupland saying: before machines the entertainment we had was relationships; machines have changed relationships.  Instead of families we now have billions of close personal fiends (this was long before Facebook too, by the way).

He seems to be very quotable as well.  I’m not quoting directly though because his quotes are usually rather long:

You never hear an animal say they’ll move to San Diego to change the color of their fur.  (This is the kind of platitude that is obvious and yet something that many people would never articulate).

The mental age people were trying to be back in the 4os and 50s was 35, but now the everyone is trying to be 24.

And (this one is a direct quote): When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they’re going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they’re going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.

But two things really hinder one’s enjoyment of this show in 2012–his slightly preachy tone (which is probably unavoidable, but given the way he is dressed, he sounds like a smug git), and the crazy hipster editing.  Coupland has always been about commercials–he loves them and embraces them as much as anything else–so there’s commercial clips, and things spliced in at crazy angles and swirls of color and text that floats across the screen and everything else that is meant to express sensory overload (indeed, Reality Bites spoofed this type of show two years earlier).  All of this sis set to a kind of Twin Peaks soundtrack.

There’s occasionally other people on screen with him from time time–joggers, body builders (he talks about our relationship with our bodies and that he is obsessed with bodybuilders and anorexics.  (He also reveals that he was skinny fat)).  There’s even the weird effect of some of these individuals sitting in the interviewers chair and “talking” to him with the interviewer’s voice overdubbed.  It’s very 90’s meta.  Which actually makes it kind of hard to focus on what he’s saying (which I guess is part of the point too).

Some of the interruptions are funny (the words “Shut Up” appear briefly on his forehead about 18 minutes in to the show).  And, really who doesn’t like to see olde time commercials?  It just seems to try so hard!

But I like the messages that he sends out.  I also like the idea that he says he had a fantasy of being in a coma  for a year and then waking up and speed consuming all the pop culture that he missed.  But that now (1996) with new media, that crash is happening every day.  You feel like you are behind every single day–a year would be impossible to wake up from.

He also offers an interesting defense to those who (in 2012) say that the computer has destroyed our memory: memory isn’t as important as being able to locate things.  That’s pretty prescient (and pleasing to a librarian).

Even though he does come across as smug, he does have some good answers to the weird questions.  Like this one: Q: if you could be any animal what animal would you be?  A: I already am an animal.

You can watch Part One here.  Part Two here.  And Part Three here.