I'd like to comment on... Home Movies by Michael Wheaton

I enjoy meeting other writers. For instance, I met Michael Wheaton at Barrelhouse Writer Camp this past June, where we had some easy conversation, and, in the spirit of camp, watched movies such as Roadhouse and Dirty Dancing with other camp attendees. There was also an evening where some other Writer Campers set a campfire ablaze using Roman candles (I think—I’m not up on fireworks). But the campfire happened, for sure.

It’s also a pleasure to then read the work of writers I meet, especially when I find the work engaging and thought-provoking. As well, those of you who regualrly read my Substack, you know that I’ve been hunting for a specific kind of book this month, and looking for short, late summer reads, I eagerly delved into Wheaton’s Home Movies.

It’s difficult to quickly explain this book, because it defies easy classification. One could see it as a book-length essay, with titled sections. Since the sections work on their own, it could be seen as an interconnected collection of essays. I’m not sure it matters what form any given reader might settle on. It’s a journey through modern life, particular as it relates to our consumption of culture and media. Home Movies really made me think about two things in particular: how mediated modern life is, and how nostalgia works.

Wheaton begins in a class he’s “allowed” to teach once a year (because it will fill once a year, which also depressed me a little because it rings true) called Intro to Film. He describes some early films he shows his class, including a grainy, black and white pillow fight by Lumiere, and asks the question to himself, and therefore the reader, “Is this art, I wonder sometimes about media I encounter. Or evidence?” Showing video clips from the late 1800s to students who can access a trove of their own clips on their phones, Wheaton begins to wonder how his course matters. And this sets up one of the central threads of the book—what is our relationships to a world that, more and more, is experienced through technology, particularly screens. And how is that reality, or not? As well as some thoughts on the concept of what matters and mattering.

Having a particular fondness for old technology, we wind through The Beatle’s catalog of music via vinyl, picture books, and their movies with Wheaton (and sometimes his kids and/or spouse). And as we work through sections like this, Wheaton drops clues that the mediated society that’s troubling him is also an intensely captialist society. He probes this idea, almost implicating the reader to interrogate what she believes. He will often drop in a short declaration or question that seems very easily understood, until you, the reader, thinks about it beyond a surface level. Examples:

“I find, despite what I want to believe, there is nothing spiritual about an object.”

“We turn every moment we can into a home movie. I feel bad about it. Would it be better to just be present?”

“So instead of literature in the classroom, we talk about apps on smartphone and stick to our own skewed personal lenses.”

“Fame seems to be the only way out of our mundane mediated consumer reality when, in fact, its just going deeper into it—an illusian of transcendence.”

I could list more. Reading this book, I started thinking about all the ways I’m mediated. I track hydration, calories, and exercise on apps on my phone. I post pictures to Instagram and Threads (I occassionally do on X, like a bad habit, but it’s not been the same since changing from Twitter to whatever X is). I listen to streaming music—although also vinyl, mp3s, CDs, and the occassional tape that hasn’t snapped, or, of course, live music. I don’t watch a lot of TV, but some, and fewer movies. These things do all contribute to my life. But, I’m happiest writing, reading, and rocking on the porch with my dog by me. Also happy hiking, cooking, sitting by a good fire. The mediated and the unmediated in my life are not wholly separate, but not wholly in sync, either.

But I can see the capitalistic strain in the mediated world. We buy all the devices and services in order to live in a certain commodified structure. We count likes and forwards and such. I counting things—calories eaten, calories burned. Do I think about why I’m counting them? Sure—health, physical appearance. There’s an aggregating quality to online life that this little book forces me to look at. As well, there’s the sheer velocity of it all. As Wheaton writes, “Lately it feels like I’m having a hard time concentrating on keeping the world together, like everything is so busy shapeshifting and duplicating at high speeds and I’m getting dominated by it every time I arrive somewhere else.” I’ve had similar feelings before. A mediated life is one accelerated. You have to be active on Teams and Zoom and whatever other platforms your work requires. We build social lives by likes and followers and such.

It’s not wholly bad, it’s just not meant to be good, either. Maybe Wheaton expresses it best when he writes “Anonymity feels like death, exposure like life, and I’m terrified of both.”

There is also a sort of reckoning with the role of nostalgia in this book that I found compelling. I often find myself yearing for the past—both my own, and an idealized past that never existed. Having just finished a book of my own about the role nostalgia played in dealing with grief, I found myself comforted that someone else has also grappled with what the heck nostalgia is and does—its means and ways. At first, Wheaton proposes that nostalgia is really just a fear of death. I get that; in a book about the death of a sibling, I found myself unearthing the pop culture of my Gen X past, my weird way of wanting to both embrace and reject the “slacker” ethos of my teens and twenties, and an uneasy embrace of feminism in a time when the idea of feminism revealed itself in fuzzy ways (Did I need to be a Riot Grrrl to be a feminist? Mary Tyler Moore? Both? Netiher?). Nostalgia glosses my anxiety and worry, both of the past and in the present.

Yet as he works through nostalgia, Wheaton changes his mind in a way that also feels right: “I think maybe nostalgia isn’t a symptom of the fear of death. It is the fear of life.”

And having written a draft of a book that looks at death and life, I think he’s on to something useful and potent. I can follow his change in perception. It makes sense to someone who used nostalgia as a balm until I realized that it really wasn’t. Later, talking about how each of us have a huge cache of photos of our lives, and the impulse to write a essay, Wheaton serves up this take, something I’ve been thinking about ever since reading it: “We’re processing our present in attempt to leave a past for a future audience. Our little versions of look at me, remember me…”

I ask myself, what is it I want so badly to preserve? And for whom?

I invite you to think about it too. Or, bet yet, read the book and see what speaks to you— hopefully away from the pernicious blinking of screens.

News and Notes

Next week, I’ll be visiting my parents in Georgia, so no I’d like to comment… until after Labor Day. Also, enjoy Labor Day!

Spooky Season enthusiasts: come join me and artist Sally Jane Brown at Art Bar in Morgantown, WV on Friday October 4 from 6-9 PM to celebrate the release of our book, What We Do In The Hollows, during Morgantown’s annual Zombie Walk. Mothman, Flatwoods Monster, and other cryptids are featured in our cool little book.

I’m currently reading Telltale Hearts: A Public Health Doctor, His Patients, and the Power of Story by Dean-David Schillinger, MD. Not too far into it yet, but it’s been an interseting read in the health humanities/narrative medicine space.

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