In Which It Doesn't Turn Out So Well For Those Kids

More Productive

by JESSE KLEIN

I have done many inane and more often irrelevant tasks in the name of productivity. I’ve cleaned toilets as a busboy and as a waiter. I have cleaned makeshift "country" toilets as a camp counselor. I have cleaned Porta-Pottys as a production assistant. It seems that between all the "productive moments" I spent serving food to people who didn’t like me and dragging kids around who didn’t like me I was cleaning up shit. And I’m not saying I had a problem with doing it or am resentful or regretful that I did it, I’m just not sure in retrospect how "productive" it was. So far, all I seem to have gotten from it is the impulse to write this essay and the lingering stink of human feces on my hands.

Unemployment is at its highest since 1948. I have had conversations with people out of law school lamenting their luck in today’s job market. This is not making light of the situation people in all markets are facing today. This is an attempt to describe the discrepancy between what we want to do, what we end up doing, and how we lie to ourselves and call the space between "productive." 

james dean & liz taylor

If you’re not in the sciences, business or a technical craft like becoming a plumber or politician, the line from school to job is not so much straight as imaginary. And when all you have are imaginary lines, you tend to make things up. You get really into your dietary habits, go on nine month bike rides it would take an afternoon to fly, go to Burning Man four years in a row. But, after a while, distracting yourself itself becomes a distraction. And so, almost all people in this confining space try to find some structure, a direction, a way to tell themselves, "This has been a productive day."

Regrettably, it seems that a day is made up of a lot of moments. A lot of moments to judge yourself and ask, "Is this productive?" If you’re not careful, you can ask yourself that question dozens of times a day. Like with googling, things get pretty intense pretty quickly when it comes to using the internet. I have spent hours googling "danny devito drunk" trying to find this clip of him drunk at eight in the morning on a local Philadelphia broadcast with the cast of It’s Always Sunny. I wasn’t trying to "pass time" or "relax"; it was really important to me to find that clip, my creative output depended on it. It took too long for me to realize the utter futility of my search.

An abridged list of things I have done in an attempt to be productive which now do not seem all that fruitful (and make me wonder about myself having thought they were a good idea in the first place):

Reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being while being very high when I was seventeen.  Writing one pretty terrible and one totally terrible play between the ages of eighteen and twenty (the pretty terrible one is called We’ll Just Wait and See while the totally terrible one is called Let’s Play). Going to Stratford, Ontario for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival twelve times with my family (at least a few of those I went on my own accord in my late teens). Being a featured extra in a short film that forced me to say "Fuck Santa" over a hundred times. In grade 11, unsuccessfully trying to mount Pee-wee's Big Adventure as a high school play (I was thwarted by the Fashion Show Committee who claimed 100% of the school’s "art" budget).

I have spent days just watching The Dick Cavett Show. Part phony nostalgia, part boredom, I got hooked watching John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzarra and Peter Falk promoting Husbands. After I’d watched that three too many times, I watched Norman Mailer argue with Gore Vidal, Groucho with Truman Capote and that was before I’d even started to focus on Cavett (he’s so interesting!). For most people, wasting time on YouTube is a harmless procedure. It becomes complicated when you begin to view YouTube as endless homework, where every random free associated thought could potentially lead to a new idea. Too often, it leads to watching seven consecutive hours of clips from The Dick Cavett Show. So out of nothing if not sheer guilt, I turn to reading.

Like a lot of people who are too scared to study literature, I have tried to read a lot of books on my own that are better suited to a class setting lead by someone who’s been trained to talk about that one specific thing. I did this when I couldn’t get work cleaning toilets. This great tradition started with (of course) Ulysses. I found a forty-year-old guide in my parents’ basement and figured I could read that along with the book. But wait, do you read the guide first and then the actual book to explain what you were about to read or read the book first and then the guide to explain it retroactively? I got nearly two hundred pages in and then decided to take up smoking. Now, all I remember is either Daedalus or Bloom shaving at the beginning and the phrase "sun like spangled coins" that I am sure I just misquoted.

As for Swann’s Way, I have read the first chapter twice. And it’s not that I didn’t like it or found myself drifting. It’s one of those books you have to read, and so you just can’t. Plus, the fact that it takes him eighty-five pages to go to sleep was a little daunting. Terrific eighty-five pages, but with no motivation other than my own impulse to do hard things for their own sake, I found myself wandering outside for too many smoke breaks.

I’ll skip recounting the experience of reading The Waste Land. Needless to say I found myself swearing a lot under my breath.

With movies it’s more complicated. Film is only a hundred years old and so people like me delude themselves into thinking they can see every movie ever made. Well not every movie, but every movie they’re supposed to see. I have spent/wasted a lot of hours thinking that this was not only true but a very good idea.

Early on in this crusade I thought, "If you’re a film student, if you’re a productive film student, you have to see The Birth of a Nation." I went to my local video store in Montreal and rented it on VHS. The problem is not even that the Klu Klux Klan are the good guys and victorious by the end (spoiler alert!). What’s important about this film is that it invented film language; the close-up, the wide shot, what we have taken for granted for eighty years. Thing is, seeing the film that invented film language is much like knowing that fact itself, and it did not take over three hours to read this paragraph.

Salo

Treading in international waters, I made my way through the European directors. The vast majority of works I saw and see are great, they inspire me to make films (which I do) and continue on this ridiculous quest. Take Pasolini. Many of his films are wonderful, and then you watch a movie like Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Based on the book by the Marquis de Sade, this film pushes the boundaries of how we use the word boundaries (with boundaries like those, who needs boundaries?). It was during the scene where the naked children are eating shit with nails in it with blood pouring out of their mouths while they’re being whipped and tortured when I asked myself, "Is this productive?" I must have thought it was because I finished the movie. It doesn’t turn out so well for those kids. For anyone, really.

Fassbinder is an amazingly innovative filmmaker. Some of his movies like In a Year of 13 Moons and Ali: Fear Eats The Soul are challenging and groundbreaking but also accessible and quite touching. But the guy made forty films in twenty years and died at thirty-seven because he did like ten grams of cocaine a day and basically didn’t sleep for twenty years and would fight with his many lovers and the German film industry and would go on-and-on-and-on at breakneck speed until he finally stopped.

Forget the fact that it’s basically impossible to find all of his films in the US; it would take a pretty long time to watch forty German movies. So, as a compromise, I decided I’d watch Berlin Alexanderplatz, his fifteen hour TV series. But, in the end, I Swann’s Way-d it. I watched the first five hours while constantly pushing aside the nagging question but finally asking myself, "Is there nothing more productive I could be doing?" So I stopped watching it and decided to move to Texas to go to film school.

Film school is a vortex of productivity. It’s a hall of mirrors where the idea of being productive distorts, changes shape and meaning. For one, all you do is work for free for three years. During these years, you learn about the equipment and refine your ability to do specific tasks, or even worse, "find your voice." (Just saying that makes it sound so fake that it makes no sense.) But really what you do is work for free for years and maybe end up with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt. Productivity is an inherently subjective notion but here it’s stretched to its logical conclusion: self-implosion.

james dean
One of the things you’re supposed to do in film school in order to be productive is "make connections." Meet people? Make people like you? Marry someone and work for their father’s roofing company? It’s all a bit unclear. The wonderful thing about film school is this: everyone in it hates each other. It’s a perverse zero sum game. If that was not enough, everyone who works in film not in film school also hates you. You’re seen as this pompous, pseudo-academic cop out avoiding the slog of actual work. And forget it if you’re getting an MFA, then people basically just want you to die.

But still, film school does afford you some space, a break from cleaning toilets. Many of my friends are getting jobs out of film school worse than the ones they had before they started. But that doesn’t negate or devalue the time they spent in between (well, maybe it does devalue it a bit). Then as now, we think it’s a productive thing to do and so we continue to go. This is where subjectivity wins out.

Jesse Klein is the senior contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about The Tree of Life and the archives of David Foster Wallace. You can find his previous work on This Recording here. He twitters here and tumbls here.

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