I just saw the movie Fantasy Life the other day and really enjoyed it. It’s a vintage indie film like those of Nicole Holofcener; a film that is not going to change the world, get Oscar nominations or maybe even be remembered in 20 years.
It’s just the exact kind of movie that people say they want – no superheroes, about real people, and made for adults.
Here’s the thing: there were 5 other people with me in that theater, even on a limited release.
Were we there because we have more integrity than other mainstream movie fans? Nope. A ton of other things can get in the way of “walking the walk” artistically in life.
Hypocrisy No Longer Hypocritical
It would be easy to say that this demonstrates that people say they want sophisticated movies, but they don’t put their money where their mouth is. Not only would it be easy to say that, but it would also be lazy to say that. It’s a cliche.
Again, I liked the movie – but it’s also a taste making movie to say you like. The norm seems to be that if somebody sees a foreign language film in a theater, or even anything at the “art house” theater in town, it takes that person about 10 minutes after it’s finished to post on Instagram how much they loved it.
That’s not hypocritical; that’s just the way it is. People have online personae, and they have their real lives. Those two things are less and less related. Or at least mutually predictive.
It might seem odd to think of us all having double lives, but it’s structurally normal now. And it’s probably been the case even since social media began.
Every tweet, post, or reel is like a press release submitted to an algorithm. They’re curated to be of interest, not necessarily representative of our lives.
I’ve probably posted 100 vacation photos on some social media platform over the years. I have never once tweeted about washing the dishes, and I’ve washed the dishes probably 200 times per vacation over the course of my life.
But we all expect that. When we watch TikTok or Facebook videos, we know we’re watching a sizzle real, not normal moments.
Film False Fronts
I started this about Fantasy Life, but the dichotomy between what we say we watch and what we watch is there in all of the arts. Shared playlists are just as curated and self-conscious as any mixtape somebody made for a girlfriend back in the day.
It’s not surprising to see somebody post that they just binged DTF St. Louis but I would definitely do a double-take if I read one of my friends bragging that they just watched reruns of 2 Broke Girls for three hours on a Saturday night.
Lifestyle Signaling
The whole situation seems like a nightmare for a marketing expert to gauge or predict sales based on “buzz.” Hard enough in entertainment, but probably even more difficult in commerce.
Everybody loves to “support local,” it costs absolutely nothing to say. And people use Starbucks as a stand-in for bourgeois consumerism. Yet, guess what the most popular coffee restaurant is in just about every neighborhood. That’s not an “aha moment”, it’s just the way buzz vs. behavior goes.
Some communities or organizers have tried their hands at legislation to ban The Gap from their shopping district. As if that’s our better nature but we just can’t help ourselves from going there.
Or my favorite example of public vs. real behavior: Symphony closings. If a mid-sized or even large city has a symphony or opera company that is close to filing for bankruptcy, the social media posts come out lamenting the state of the arts and that a burgeoning opera scene is the hallmark of a first-class city.
Eventually, a rich local benefactor swoops in to save the day so we can all go back to normal. Which is nobody going to the opera or the symphony.
I-Dentity
We’ve called social media behavior “virtue signaling” and while that’s true, I’m not trying to be critical or blow the lid off of inconsistent behavior. It’s just a fact. And everybody does it in their own way; not having a calculated persona IS a calcuated persona. There’s no escape.
But what I think all of our posts and press conferences for nobody are just that: for nobody. I would submit that these posts do way more for people to clarify their own choices and opinions for themselves than they do for informing others about you.
The things we say publicly are self-definition. And even if we behave differently, that doesn’t mean we don’t believe the contradictory things we said.
Behavior Interrupted
Let’s go back to the movie choice. I saw Fantasy Life the other day because I had the afternoon free, a cool art house cinema a couple miles away, and the showtime worked out great with my plans.
The stars aligned for me to see it. There are plenty of factors that had they gone the other direction, would have kept me from seeing it. If the movie was at 3:00 instead of 2:00, I would have skipped it – and Fantasy Life is not a multiple screen movie. True indies like this are lucky to get one screen in a city to themselves for 1-2 weeks.
If I felt like just seeing a movie regardless of what it was, it would be unlikely to show up at a multiplex and run into Fantasy Life. Furthermore, I only even found out about the movie from some minor Instagram post on it that happened to show up in my algorithm. I very easily could have never known the movie existed until well past its short theatrical run.
What I’m getting at is, sure, people act based on what they value. But the other equally important factors are availability and convenience.
Conclusion
I think most of us would rather have a pasta and vinegrette salad for dinner than a Big Mac. How often we do that depends largely on our values but also how tired we are, what kind of day we had, how annoying traffic might have been on the way home, and impulse. That doesn’t make us phonies.
Meanwhile, we still might take a shot at McDonalds in a social media post. Jim Gaffigan did ten great minutes on the hypocrisy of rolling ones eyes at McDonalds. I hope you’ve seen it:
We can still have our profiles, our harmless virtue-signaling, and online fantasy life. Thankfully, everybody is media sophisticated enough now not to point fingers at each other for being online hypocrites. And that’s great.
That said, please don’t make me go to a Marvel movie. That’s my online position and also my real-life policy.
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