John Wilson’s absurdist ode to New York Metropolis

AFTER WATCHING the third and remaining season of How To with John Wilson, I wrote some questions for the great folks in HBO’s publicity division to cross alongside to the present’s lovable, bespectacled star and creator:

1) Who takes care of your cat while you’re away on shoots and all of a sudden end up inside a full-scale reproduction of the Titanic in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, with a gruff ex-cop who doesn’t imagine the ship sank in any respect and in addition actually needs to discover a Bozo the Clown saltshaker?

2) What’s your favourite Ron Howard film? (Howard’s oeuvre is type of a motif on this season.)

3) Have you ever ever learn Borges’s creepy magic-realist fable, “Funes the Memorious,” also called “The One In regards to the Man Who Fell Off a Horse and Woke Up with a Reminiscence So Hello-Def and Flawless He’s Unable to Deal With the World”?

Mendacity at the hours of darkness in his bed room, “Funes remembered each leaf of each tree of each wooden,” Borges’s awed narrator relates. Funes looks as if the type of particular person Wilson may stumble throughout in his freaky peregrinations. On this season, among the folks he encounters embody a die-hard Mets fan (they find yourself watching a fuzzy VHS of the O. J. Simpson trial whereas consuming a TV dinner), bodybuilders at a contest devoted “to these misplaced on 9/11”—a whole lot of them had been born after the assault—and a man who reveals his huge and unwholesome spreadsheet devoted to what occurs in each body of each episode of The Bachelor, compiled throughout what he calls “a hyper-binge.” However Wilson is Funes the Memorious, too, if he had grown up on Lengthy Island and will depend on a Sony FS5 camcorder relatively than an equine-induced mind damage. Seemingly all his recollections are on video, anarchy formed into the encyclopedic, insane, and weirdly mesmerizing cult program we’ve been gawping at since 2020. The great folks at HBO haven’t gotten again to me but.

Simply in case you’ve been watching The Bear or one thing, each episode of How To begins from a simple, stand-up-style premise after which metastasizes, by way of all types of rabbit holes and crazy metaphors, into one thing deeply weird, e.g., this season’s episode “How To Work Out” begins by considering the purgatorial world of the modern health club, offers with how Wilson bought all “Paranoid Android” on the Emmys—Elon Musk was there? —solely to seek out salvation at a pumpkin-growing contest. We at all times find yourself again residence in Brooklyn in possession of some absurd but heartwarming nugget of information.

And definitive information or info is usually a very troublesome factor to acquire immediately. How To is probably the most acute illustration of how all people has, in a profound method, misplaced their shit for the reason that web was invented. If you see the poor greyhound skittering perilously alongside a window ledge in episode 5, it’s unattainable not to consider the entire thing as a meme: “Me after seeing King Charles’s claws.” (Don’t fear: the plucky hound survives.)

The present’s hyperlinked method to montage catalogues the unreal and sinister texture of on a regular basis life whereas concurrently making a world of set-ups, punch traces, and goofy psychedelic puns, like Sans Soleil (1983) however with jokes. “It’s arduous to get enthusiastic about it,” Wilson says re: sports activities, and gazes on the flaccid schlong of a scorching canine in his lap at an ice hockey sport. (He finds a whole lot of #cursedimages within the wild.)

This free-floating, associative vibe is perhaps the closest TV’s come to consuming social media; the expertise of watching continuously approximates being locked into the hallucinogenic TikTok feed of an especially adventurous stoner powered by what Wilson self-diagnoses as “a starvation for uncommon pictures”—“Whoa . . . have a look at this bizarre portrait of a cat. I’m at a cat present in NJ, BTW!” “Have a look at this man singing ‘Please Freeze Me’ on the cryogenics convention. Sorry, John, Paul, George, and Ringo.”

And now the basic twenty-first-century follow-up query begins to smile at us like a deep-fake Cheshire Cat: Are you able to belief these pictures? One of many extra-trippy undercurrents of this season is Wilson dwelling on the large epistemological conundrum of documentary itself: How “actual” is it? Which used to only remind you of F For Pretend however within the post-truth/AI-addled current pertains to all the things. Wilson confesses that generally the present is type of . . . faux. In a earlier season, he didn’t simply reuse that on-line video of a bathroom demonically puking shit however painstakingly reconstructed it on a soundstage. (How To is, by the way, coproduced by Nathan Fielder, creator of The Rehearsal, which equally freaks with the distinction between actual and never.) There’s additionally some trippy low-key conceptual instability round what number of “John Wilsons” there are, since he isn’t really the one particular person bringing in content material for the present. For those who hold a Terminator eye on the credit and his interviews, you uncover that every episode’s huge matrix of footage is partially collected by different cameramen roaming town.

The ex-cop’s automobile blows up on the finish of his episode, and but: There he’s amid the primary responders afterwards, grinning like you-know-who.

Perhaps one of many methods to cope with the bizarre ordeal of residing with this predicament is by accumulating stuff. Wilson is huge on collectors: He will get E.T. collectible figurines within the mail; he met that man who dined on a stash of expired navy meals; he . . . oh wait, one other factor simply arrived for the person with all of the Michael Jackson memorabilia. There’s an excellent riff on how ready for packages to reach is among the ways in which we now make investments our time with which means and pleasure, just for the excessive to put on off. The oldsters on the vacuum cleaner conference in Scranton might seem to be oddballs, however who knew that episode would flip right into a touching meditation on loss? Maybe when Jeff Koons lined up his Plexiglas-encased Hoovers within the Eighties, he too was occupied with lifeless relations. After which the melancholy ambition of accumulating to shore in opposition to spoil and chaos turns psychotic—hoarding!—and we discover the nightmare trashscape any individual left within the basement of Wilson’s constructing.

“What’s going on in folks’s brains?” is perhaps the large query of the present. It’s requested in amazement or deadpan innocence. In a season two episode—nominally on “furnishings coverings”—we meet an anti-circumcision activist purging his rage on an Omnichord. (He was sporting a T-shirt together with his web site on it, clearly.) The opposite self-soothing technique you’ll be able to go for is forming a bit of tribe. How To is filled with self-made communities and their numerous baffling rituals, whether or not they’re rowdy soccer followers, Avatar obsessives, or Protected folks hypersensitive to Wi-Fi who dwell in isolation, a lot of them introduced collectively (or into one other type of solitude) by the web.

“Actuality” has at all times been particularly unstable in New York, which is a whole lot of what makes town so nice. The place else are you going to seek out folks with automobile horns blasting Nino Rota’s theme for The Godfather? (“No one minds that a lot.”) Or a bodega working “25/7”? Its high-density anthropomorphic weirdness sends Wilson off on his missions and acts as his muse: Each episode begins, “Hey, New York . . .” It’s residence, it’s nuts, and it’s the labyrinth by which John’s meditations on “the human situation” start and finish.

The present is many issues: documentary gone bonkers, autobiography, otherworldly anthropology love letter to NYC, poetry made out of rubbish. Right here’s a monkey John noticed with two tufts of fur formed into satan horns; right here’s a bunch of individuals in monster XL blue raincoats cleansing stadium seats at Citi Subject wanting like they got here from Beckett’s Quad (1982); right here’s three Minnie Mice in Santa Claus costumes in Instances Sq.—one is taking her cartoon head off so you’ll be able to see the particular person beneath. I considered David Berman’s poems so much whereas I used to be watching: “Even the headstones within the graveyard / appear to face up and say ‘Hi there, my identify is . . .”

— Charlie Fox

How To with John Wilson is streaming on HBO Max.