What’s new about this show is that the audience can interact with the actors, via blogging and comment posting on the quarterlife set, thus packaging the idea that these celebrities really aren’t very different from you and me, a high-dollar concept that keeps the traffic coming and keeps many of us attached to the television or computer into the wee hours of the night. Because figuring out the answers and endings to plot lines similar to those playing out in our own lives may help us feel better about ourselves, right?
After quarterlife froze onscreen for a few moments while my Internet connection tried to transfer data, I moved over to Joe Swanberg’s series, Young American Bodies on Nerve.com, to encounter mumblecore—a new, growing film genre. Mumblecore reminds me of a fifth-year student who hung around my off-campus housing during college, mumbling about what had already been played out, experienced, or spoken—all of which was communicated to me in a condescending tone, as if assuming I had never loved or lost.
I’m all for the do-it-yourself approach (it gives all of us a chance), but even though I thoroughly enjoy the conversations I have with friends dissecting our lives—sometimes with the help of red wine—does that mean I should invite a third friend to crouch down three feet away from us and film these events with his digital video camera? Mumblecore and its adherents think so.
It started with Swanberg, who has directed a film every year, beginning with Kissing on the Mouth in 2005. LOL followed in 2006; most recently, Hannah Takes the Stairs was released in 2007. Other directors in the mumblecore movement include Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair) and Andrew Bujalski (Mutual Appreciation)—who is set to direct a film adaptation of Indecision, a novel by my fellow writer and Burning Man friend, Benjamin Kunkel. In an interview with the New York Times, Swanberg, who produces films of greater quantity than quality in my opinion (after watching the few episodes of Young American Bodies that I managed to get through), admitted that he had come to the realization of a lofty ideal: filmmaking is all about focusing on the craft.
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