And The Truth Will Set You Up

I mostly stayed inside and watched Living with Yourself on Netflix this weekend, deciding I didn’t care for rain. I may have to rethink some things.

Paul Rudd and Paul Rudd

There are only eight episodes, around 30 minutes each, so the total time investment was kind of minimal, particularly on a Saturday. I like to watch Paul Rudd and the concept sounded a little intriguing, and I guess I remained intrigued.

It wasn’t really the quality of the show, although I thought it was fine. The acting was good, the pacing was acceptable, and the little Rashomon effect-ness of the plot was fun and very well done, showing us the same scene from various perspectives (usually in the next episode, something that might not have worked as well without the binge assumption).

Side note: Does anyone else run into problems making binge into a gerund? Is it binge-ing? Binging doesn’t work, but bingeing looks odd. Moving on.

It was mostly the idea of fake-as-truth that led to this intrigue on my part. I wrote a column this morning on the idea, as it’s been murmuring at me for a long time. It’s technology vs. truth, although it’s more accurate to say it’s truth vs. confirmation biases, our desire to believe what we already suspect is true.

I actually think technology has little to do with it. We can worry about deep fakes, but then I guess we can worry about prank phone calls, too. Eventually we learn to be skeptical, at least once we get burned a few times. Or some of us, anyway.

This was demonstrated by the reaction of...OK, I guess I have to explain first. Quick and dirty – Paul Rudd plays Miles Elliott, an advertising copywriter who seems uninspired and unhappy with his life. He gets a mysterious reference from a coworker about a certain spa that does wonders, kind of a cleansing process. It’s outrageously expensive ($50,000) as well as a little spooky, promising to clean up the frayed edges of his man’s DNA, buff him up a bit.

They just clone him, though. It’s cloning. The cloners intend to just “deactivate” (i.e., murder) the original body, although in the case of Miles mistakes are made and corners are cut. He wakes up in a shallow grave, very much alive, frantic, and about to discover that there are two of him.

It’s not a spoiler. This is all in the trailer.

Here’s a minor spoiler, maybe – his wife eventually finds out that she’s been sharing her life with a Xerox husband along with the original, and she’s not surprised, she’s pissed. She never questions the technology; she’s just angry at the deception, at the fiction being passed off as reality.

It just felt like a parable for our times, a little. It’s a good show, compelling and sometimes funny. Rudd is always a pleasure to watch, and the twinning is seamless, although TV has been doing this since before Samantha Stevens conjured up her evil twin. We’re not particularly impressed with the technology either.

...

I mentioned Fantasyland a bit a couple of years ago. It was eye opening, this book by Kurt Andersen, a look at how Americans have been fooling ourselves for a very long time (he takes it back to the 16th century). It got the attention of Marc Maron this past summer, and recently he had Andersen on his podcast, WTF with Marc Maron, for a little chat.

And Maron made an anecdotal point that really resonated with me, and maybe explains some stuff. He talked about his father, apparently a pretty apolitical person, who watches FOX News all the time and doesn’t understand the problem. It looks like news to him. Why would he doubt it?

It makes a lot of sense to me, particularly the generational part. I run into this all the time, the past getting in the way of contemporary understanding. My daughter is constantly calling me out about what she sees, I guess, as fat-shaming on my part when I bring up the fact that people are really fat these days. We all know it and see it, and the only defense I have is that I notice because it’s different. We all struggle with weight these days, or most of us. I just remember when there were far fewer of us in the obvious obese category.

Certain people remember when the news was delivered by Walter Cronkite, solemnly telling us the truth and nothing but. We trusted because there was a system in place to prevent fraud. Americans owned the airwaves, and so we could monitor and regulate. You get in trouble for lying to the public. Or you did.

So Rush Limbaugh can get on the radio and lie and distort, and certain people take it as gospel because it sounds right. FOX opinion hosts lie and distort every day, well documented.

Well documented. The truth is fairly easy to find, but you have to want to find it. And even this doesn’t feel all that relevant anymore. Don’t like Donald Trump? Blame him. Don’t blame the carnival barkers who fill your heads with fluffy evil. They just exist because you believe them. Be the pissed wife in this scenario, maybe.