Kill the Noise
Are we too curated? How watching a documentary created new perspective.
Recently, Cathryn and I watched Pee-wee as Himself, the Paul Ruebens documentary. As we watched it, Cathryn mused about the likelihood of parents saying, “there’s something wrong with Pee-wee, I don’t want you watching that.” I laughed harder than I thought I would because I was certain my parents had said something to that effect. Pee-wee Herman was an oddball, loud, colorful, and patently bizarre. I still put his first film, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, in my top movies list. Its absurdity is important in a way I can’t describe, and the road trip formula echoes through Tim Burton’s future work like Big Fish, and other oddball travel features like Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
What caught me while watching Pee-wee as Himself wasn’t the stroll through memories of weirder corners of culture, but the amount of photos and footage Paul Ruebens collected throughout his life. The documentary had no need for reenactments and dramatizations, Reubens’ vault of imagery decorated the film just as much as archived footage from CBS, or Warner Brothers. I found myself surprised that someone ran a camera while Paul and his staff worked on landscaping around his California home. Along with simple moments, he featured clips and snapshots from his time in the Groundlings and before. This included student works from his life in college.
No one spends time with me like Cathryn does. She knows I had a history behind a camera. But that was years ago. “I put the camera down in 2014 and walked away toward comics,” is the constant thread I feed everyone when asked. Sure, there was a time I wanted to make movies. I considered myself a writer, director, and storyboard artist. That’s all behind me, now. Seeing Ruebens’ footage didn’t spring me back into my days dreaming of Hollywood, though. The parts I saw were still absurdist, sure. But I saw all these little snippets and shots of unique humanity.
Maybe it’s working through a gauntlet of health issues, but I’ve been wrestling with mortality a lot lately. I know my journey will end eventually. What’s hard for me is knowing that I won’t be there to help people work through it. That’s the whole point of being gone. Hopefully the end is far, far away. As an atheist, I think about how special it is to be one of the parts of the universe that actually gets to form relationships and know itself through living. I try to remind myself that we all live on, after death, through our actions, what we leave behind, and who we leave behind. Our actions, such as planting a tree, buying a car, or helping someone, ripple outward in ways we can’t always measure. The artifacts we leave behind inform others of what we did, what we had, and who we were. The people we leave behind retain memories that inform who we were to them, fragments of the person we were in our heads and actions.
Seeing glimpses of the private, quiet Ruebens, wearing personalities he’d constructed in Pee-wee as Himself, reminded me of the value I put in pictures and videos. There’s a bit of nostalgia in there, but what really exists is a wish for a time before social media. Or, better yet, a wish for time that is now without social media. As an artist, I’ve started to focus on metrics and value online. I am trying to figure out what’s working and why, and how to bring people back over and over again. I get caught up in the urge to turn everything into content. I don’t take pictures unless I’m going to put them in some content online. I don’t have private profiles where I share little bits of my life. Everything has to be curated to some degree. Instagram isn’t for food pictures anymore, and Facebook is just a marketing strategy.
The noise of the internet, and how I live my life online, has utterly realigned everything I know about myself. I’m not afraid to admit that doomscrolling Facebook, or some other app, is a struggle I go through. What makes it worse is having so many wonderful professionals in my world connected online which amplifies the brain bleeding that comes from worrying I’m not making enough content. Or I’m not making the right content. Or worse, I’m just not relevant.
I remember a time when creating what I create was something I did without agonizing over all these things. I can summon to mind a time when a camera was never more than a few feet away. A time when I, too, took pictures of friends. I remember filming a friend, in black and white, laying in the grass by a river. There was a different lifetime in which I might film an empty street at night, a rogue toilet in an alleyway, or someone’s forgotten milk at a bus stop.
Where did all these images and videos end up? Some of it is scattered in old Facebook entries, while most of it is just missing. That’s a bitter thing to admit. Where did it go? Some of it died on lost platforms like classic MySpace or Vine. Others are probably on an SD card somewhere, but I couldn’t begin to guess. None of it is on my camera roll these days. It’s all reference images, progress shots, and finished works.
Like the tidbits from Ruebens’ life, those shots and videos all held some humanity. Now, for me, content is largely doom and noise. I’m scratching and clawing through neatly tailored online content, striving to be genuine while tailoring my own content. I’m pushing past the disingenuous as much as I can, while still waking up to AI slop every day. It’s all fucking noise, and I fear I am losing myself in it all. I love what I make, and, while I hope it conveys humanity and genuineness, there’s little I make or capture because it means something in the moment.
I’m trying to unplug more. Admittedly, I struggle in silence. I’m doing little things like listening to music more. I’m trying to be in the moment and pay attention to what’s at hand, whether it’s a television show, a movie, or a videogame. I look at some of the books I own nearly every day, and I long to read them. I want to do little things that take me somewhere better, teach me something, or preserve my humanity. I want to be in the moment, and focus on relationships because I think we’re better offline.
There was something beautiful twenty years ago when making irrelevant content was the point. The meant whatever you wanted it to mean. Foolish, goofy, offbeat videos, or test footage of stop-motion animation, or photographs of what we did one afternoon was the point. It was evidence I — we — were making, creating, growing. We wore the flaws and hit publish as soon as we could. It was something else. The noise wasn’t there yet, we hadn’t welcomed it into our lives.
While I’ll never have the juggernaut impact of a character like Pee-wee Herman, I am concerned that I’ll have buried so much of myself under the curated conceptualized content of the internet that there will be little left of me in what I leave behind. How can we hold onto the genuine? How can we capture humanity? How can we be in the moment? We need to kill the noise.
Sometimes I look at past me and think “why can’t I be more like him?”