Hi again and thank you for reading my substack where I talk about everything I did instead of reading. My main distraction was
QUIET ON SET
Every documentary loves to hold a disgusting twist that’ll be clickbaited later on a website run by AI interns, and this one was no different. Would I have been able to guess how John Wayne Gacey and Drake Bell were related before this? I audibly gasped when he came onto the screen. Which brings me to my
DRAKE BELL DISTRACTION
I forgot, or maybe just discovered, that Drake Bell is really, really famous in Mexico. I’ve been particularly fixated on videos of him as Bebe Alien on a Mexican TV Show that’s kind of like the Masked Singer, but honestly I still can’t grasp the concept. In one video, he takes off this alien head and it’s revealed that it’s been him all along, Drake Campana himself. The host is in disbelief: do you know what you mean to this country
? He starts singing the theme song from Drake & Josh, and Drake picks up the tune, twirling around in a gaudy alien costume as the crowd claps. It’s so, so, weird. In another, Drake’s getting interviewed, talking about how much he loves Bebe Alien (like what is that I don’t even know) and what a fun experience this was for him, as the video intercuts with him dancing on stage with the Bebe Alien head on, high-fiving with dancers. “People liked me,” Drake Bell says, alien costume still on, “and they didn’t even know who I was!” Maybe it’s the earnestness of Latin-American television, or the hugeness of the costume, or simply the hollowness in his eyes — but the video makes me weep. Something that must be said is that Drake Campana’s song “Diosa” has been stuck in my head for the better part of the week. It’s “despacito-core” for sure, and I apologize for this, but it fucking slaps. As my friend half-Uruguayan friend Matthew says: they hate to see a white boy with too much Latino swag.
AMANDA BYNES DISTRACTION
Amanda Bynes was so electric; you can still feel her energy through the screen. The high, almost mid-Atlantic tilt of her voice is so memorable, and make everything she says (“See you next week, I have to REUPHOLSTER MY FATHER!”) so, so funny. Watching now, I’m like okay why was that little girl working so hard (crazy little girl, no limits, all dreams)? Where did all that energy come from? In interviews, Amanda is Beyoncé levels of awkward and stand-offish. The energy she has on stage doesn’t translate to the chair. I wonder if she knows who she is.
Watching her recent TikToks, she informs her followers in a concerning monotone that she’s only “wearing wigs now,” and then in a later video informs her followers that actually, she’s only wearing extensions. It almost seems like she’s playing a character in one of her sketches, which were funny because they were so, as my friend Han said, “random.”
ENGLISH MAJOR WATCHING DOCUMENTARY DISTRACTION
Of course, in this new horrible context, we understand that the sketches are not random at all. The adult writers stuffed every sketch with jokes about dicks, cum shots, and feet. My friend El rightfully pointed out that each sketch is “fetish content,” and yeah, if you saw somebody brushing their teeth with a toe on your For You page, you would call it exactly that.
This brings me to thinking about movies like Skinamarink (2023) about two children trapped in a house in the late 90s where every door and window keep disappearing, leaving them without parents and only among their sinister-looking, but entirely familiar toys.
I can’t watch this movie because I’m afraid of the intrusive thoughts it would give me but my younger sister told me that it captured the exact feeling of being a kid in 2002 and needing to pee in the middle of the night. Watching the All That and Amanda Show sketches, I’m reminded of a similar type of fear. You have no control as a child but more importantly, no context. Your life operates on what’s being told to you, and your sense of reality’s shaped by the older people in your life who actually have agency.
Something similar’s happening with I Saw The TV Glow, a movie about two teenagers obsessed with a Buffy-esque show they used to watch as children. A character emphasizes that it’s “way too scary for most kids.” The teenagers and the show start effecting one another, and a new horror begins. Watching Amanda Show sketches where a funny family eats meatloaf for breakfast, or “Pickleman” going around with a plate of pickles while smiling in a sinister-sexual way, I feel this horror. This was too scary for most kids, but we didn’t fucking know that. The aesthetics are almost Lynchian, except entirely more sinister because children are involved. The sense of unease comes from a lack of context that only the adults who are writing the show have.
Context is everything in horror and a lack of context provides fear, which makes me think that being a child is — I’m sorry to be so dramatic here— a fascist experience. I’m so happy I’m not a kid and I’m so happy I was never a child star. Nobody ever tells you shit and it’s supposed to be because they’re protecting you, but sometimes it’s because you’re the punchline or the person being harmed.
I think we are only just now defining the uncanniness of our childhood media, in the same way scary movies for past few decades have made horrors out of picket fences and Leave it To Beaver imagery. My prediction is that the Spongebob generation will produce a lot more movies like this as we enter this next fucked up stage of our lives.
WHAT I READ
Who Is Andrew Huberman, Really?
I loved learning about this beefy pop neuro scientist man who lies. In this article it’s revealed that he was seeing 6 women at the same time, including a mysterious actress who goes by the name Eve. Dyyyying to know who she is. The women all find each other and then form a beautiful group chat, which is just as important as getting 10 minutes of sun a day and not drinking alcohol, the two things that Andrew Huberman preaches about with a bunch of “science speak” that I don’t think he even understands. Olivia and I discussed that he’s probably good at sex in a way where he probably practices his moves alone. Not like, in a masturbatory way, but in an athletic way. How else, we said, would he have been able to keep all these bitches?
I loved Lucas Mann’s Captive Audience, which I pitch to people as essays about reality TV that are also a love letter to the writer’s wife. In that collection, he writes a lot about the performance of love, and how being loved is about being seen but also, complicatedly, being watched. Here, Lucas Mann explores fatherhood in a love letter to his daughter. His prose is accessible and funny, intellectual and packed with familiar angst and nuanced conclusions. In the title essay, Mann articulates millennial worries about trying to live morally right while also being honest about where and how we live through the lens of animals, both real and cartoon. There’s an anxiety about trying to get to something “real” by insisting on introducing your children to your childhood cartoons, even though those cartoons were nostalgic for something else. It’s about how, in wanting to preserve innocence for your children, you are also trying to soothe yourself. He says:
“a [rhino’s] extinction is near inevitable; to indulge in weepy informercial environmentalism is just nostalgia for a simpler kind of sadness. But watching a kid flicker with curiosity, with care, for something alive and unknowable still stokes memory and hope, all at once. Still falls so pleasurably into a timeless, beautiful, doomed routine: see the animal, imagine the animal, look into its eyes, find love in your idea of it. [My daughter] wants to see everything. She wants to believe that everything is looking back at her.”
In “An Essay About Watching Brad Pitt Eat,” Mann examines his own eating disorder and relationship to addiction while talking about raising his daughter to love herself. This one really made me emotional, and maybe, as Mann seems to say, it’s because the bar is on the floor for good fathers, but it was really beautiful for me to see somebody articulate their love for their own kid, because good, effective love involves so much internal struggle. He writes about how while his own image fills him with anxiety, his daughter will rush to the mirror to calm herself down. This line made me cry: “Hooray, I say, hooray my big eater, my best eater — leaping over that lowest bar of not making a toddler feeling anything toward herself but love.”
That’s all thanks for stopping by xoxoxoxoxo