Viva Emptiness by Matt O'Neill

I was watching Garden State recently, directorial debut for Scrubs stalwart Zach Braff, and ruminating upon its various themes and Natalie Portman’s remarkable ability to make a thoroughly annoying twit an endearing character, and an interesting quote appeared.

“I’m okay being unimpressive. I sleep better.”

This somewhat contradictory celebration of unassumingness immediately brought to mind author Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout, a hapless, possibly brilliant, perpetually cursed author, who, in Vonnegut’s masterful Breakfast of Champions, travels to an arts convention purely to show the sheer unrewarding pointlessness of being an artist.

The final association (and I promise it’s the last one), in this triumvirate of unremarkability, is Mr Meursault from Albert Camus’ existentialist text L’Estranger (I read it in English as The Outsider, but I feel French adds a certain cultural gravitas to my opinions), who is so indifferent to concepts of impressive and unimpressive, he eventually shoots an arab, utterly indifferent to the results of his actions (sorry to ruin it for you, but you all should read more anyway).

The uniting thread, I find, for these three characters is utter mediocrity. It has become increasingly the case throughout our times that we celebrate the weird, the unusual, the freaks and overlook the sheer beauty of the dull and the cliché.

There’s a great moment in Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest where a Jack bemoans the company he keeps (namely, the witty Algernon) “Why must you be so clever, the world is full of being clever, whatever happened to the fools?” to which Algernon replies “there are still scores of fools, old chap” or something similarly Wilde-ian and Jack asks

“What do they talk about?”
“The fools? Why the clever people of course,”
“What fools!”

Such is the predicament we find ourselves in today, across various spheres of cultural engagement. We live in a world of democratised media presence; myspace, youtube, facebook etc all provide even the most mundane and mind-numbing of cretins to launch their career. You can become famous merely for being a horrible, horrible singer and having the conceit to film your inadequacies in action.

The result, ideally, would be to get a complete picture of culture, from the woefully unusual, to the woefully normal, but instead, everyone needs an angle, either to perform or to view performance. Big Brother 08, instead of slotting in some truly trying individuals with no personality, do just the opposite and, by unifying their nutjobs, actually become just as mundane.

Andy Warhol once hypothesised that everyone would have fifteen minutes of fame in the future, but the problem is everyone seems to be aware that they are having their fifteen minutes, or are perpetually scared of their fifteen minutes occurring and them not knowing it.

I suggest we stalk people and then give them fifteen minutes to address the world on camera, and then film them for an additional hour without telling them. Then we’ll get the really solid, beautiful, boring stuff and not have to worry about all this contemptible uniqueness.