year of content (a 2021-trospective)
By: James Nash
Tags: End Of Year, Theatre, Content, Games, Personal Essay

credit: alex brenner (set/costumes: charlie espiner // lighting: alex fernandes)

Hello! I’ve been looking forward to writing this. It feels like a nice way to clear mental room for the year incoming. It also feels like a nice time to solidify ideas and say things. Let’s do that.

I spent a lot of time online this year and feel poorer for it. I spent my time trawling twitter or instagram or youtube or tiktok, usually bored at what I was consuming but not enough to do literally anything else. Content slips into how I think about things. The podcast The Content Mines and the newsletter Garbage Day may have had something to do with it, and both feel like breathing space to collect thoughts on what the internet is rn (or at least two other peoples thoughts on it). I’d recommend it to anyone interested in the internet/internet culture. I think it is worth talking about. I was considering doing a ‘best content’ section to this, but I don’t think I’d remember enough of it. It’s too ephemeral to make a lasting impact unless it’s something so wild you can’t not think of it, and I don’t want to give that further space. The only thing I’ve noticed is that everything seems faster: the cycle of memes, the immediacy of response, the reaction in the offline world. It feels disconcerting.

I don’t know how I feel about Inside. I think it’s inventive in what it does visually with one camera and a few LED lights, I think the songs are really great (always catchy, some emotionally hard-hitting), and its exploration of depression and the growing contentification of everything in the pandemic era is emotionally impactful and (to me) important. But I can’t recommend it fully. There’s an intangible quality that keeps me from loving it totally. Some topics/targets feel obvious. Much of its non-music comedy segments are forgettable. And despite its stance Inside cannot escape the snare of content, inspiring much of its own. While there is something heartening about people responding to something by creating, it’s practically fuel for the platforms that make this bad content possible. Also, some of it is really cringe.

THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH IS ABOUT DOGS DYING/PET GRIEF SO PLEASE SKIP IF YOU DON’T WANT TO READ ABOUT IT. Two of my dogs died this year, Tess was 16, and Fred was 13. Both were put down due to health complications. When Tess died I felt okay, mainly because she had lived a long life and had been in poor health for a few years. It had been a long time coming and I had time to process it. It was strange seeing the places she would often lay now being vacant, the ongoing realisation that she will never be there ever again. Fred’s death came quicker. He had an inoperable brain tumour. He became slower and weaker, and after a day spent whining in pain, we felt it wasn’t right for him to continue. I was there when he died, and remember thinking I could see his eye move, his paw twitch; I felt a hope beyond hope that he would suddenly spring up for a cuddle. The suddenness of it all made it harder to deal with. I had spent a lot of the pandemic hanging out with Fred and that absence I felt with Tess became especially compounded. I think about him often. The grief for a pet is nothing compared to the grief for a person, but in their passing the qualities they had and the memories they left behind become so clear. A friend messaged me after Fred’s death and wrote that he ‘made us all happy without knowing’, which feels very selfless in a way. What a legacy for a dog to have.

I didn’t read that many books this year but I’m glad I read No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood and Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino. No One Is Talking About This captures (more any art I know) the strange meeting place of the internet and our lives, how each blurs into the other, how language is changing because of it, and what can happen to rupture us from our online lives. I found it a compelling read and it made me laugh a lot. Trick Mirror might be the best book of essays I’ve ever read and will join The Secret History in the collection of books I will keep with me no matter what. I think about Trick Mirror often due to how Tolentino explores/deals with the complexity of each of her essays’ topics. Each covers a lot of ground, sometimes feeling like two (or three!) essays at once, but she always manages to wrap them together. I hope I can be as good a writer/as deep a thinker as Tolentino is. It’s also stayed with me because a section at the end of the book that puts into words something I felt about myself: “The more I try to uncover whatever I’m looking for the more I feel that I’m too far gone. I can feel the low, easy hum of self-delusion whenever I think about all of this (…) the tug of my deep and recurring suspicion that anything I might think about myself must be somehow unnecessarily wrong.”

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut was the best game I played this year. I’d recommend it to everyone, even/especially people who don’t play games. I have not played a game recently that felt so rich in its text/art/design/voice acting. There is texture in everything. Running through the world feels like fingers moving across the grooves of a puzzle box. I remember chatting to friends and being overjoyed in the ways they overcame certain problems in ways I couldn’t have imagined. The world feels lived in and full; even it’s smallest characters are fleshed out and memorable. It feels like the game Cyberpunk 2077 wanted to be, made by a smaller team with fewer resources (and *way* better politics). It never wastes your time and feels chock full of things to do. For once I felt bad for not doing a game’s sidequests, for missing out on what it had to offer. If most games are about the physical (controlling a body in space) Disco Elysium is the cerebral, though presented in an incredibly visceral way. Regret and stagnation marinade your avatar and the world around you. But still it asks you to carry on, that it’s never too late to make some change, being labelled a sorry-socialist-art-cop or otherwise. It’s a game about being vulnerable, about learning to be aware of yourself and the world around you. It also has the best voice acting in any game ever. In so many ways, nothing (games or otherwise) comes close. A second play is an inevitability.

I saw Civilisation in 2019 but in the haze of the Fringe was too tired to take it in. Seeing it again this year cemented it as one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. Subconsciously I’ve always wanted a show like this. Something that presents the ennui of being alone, the tiny moments that usually lay un-staged, the small hours curled up in bed with no one but your laptop. It’s the most beautiful bit of ‘naturalism’ I’ve ever seen on stage. The way it uses ‘Lay All Your Love on Me’ will be seared into my brain until I die. I love the choreography and the smooth focus of the dancers performing it. Their inclusion alongside the naturalism complicates our viewing, its movements responding to the naturalism as if to a soundtrack. Its interpretation-made-physical, though it is similarly abstracted. Civilisation gives you no exposition to cling to but many prompts to imagine off. Maybe the show is suggesting we shouldn’t be interpreting this woman’s grief but just pay witness to it. Maybe the dancers are filling the space left by the main character’s deceased partner. Whatever reading is made, we’re eventually left with a blank stage, its dancers moving without music, stripped of any interpretation the audience can give them. Then the show ends.

I spent June-November in a strange frame of mind. Of course things weren’t back to normal, but it felt the most like 2019 in a while. I saw my friends, went to the theatre, went back to work (eventually quiting the job I disliked), and got a new job. And that was all good! But I had some bad thoughts in my mind; that I had wasted the pause the pandemic gave me; that I had ended up in the same place as I had before. As autumn progressed I felt things were likely to get worse COVID-wise, that none of the current climate felt real.

FILMS I LOVED: The Twentieth Century, Beyond Clueless, Shiva Baby, L.A. Confidential, Minari, After Love, Another Round, Censor, Gobble-Gobble, The Green Knight, The French Dispatch, Cryptozoo

SONGS I LOVED: This Is The Day (The The), I’ve Told Every Little Star (Linda Scott), Starry Eyes (Cigarettes After Sex), 僕は一寸 (Haruomi Hosono), Bees & Honey (Rina Sawayama), Chaconne in G (Moondog), White Mice (Mo-Dettes), Avril 14th (YACHT), Savage Good Boy (Japanese Breakfast), Content, Sexting, Look Who’s Inside Again, Problematic, Don’t Wanna Know, All Eyes On Me (Bo Burnham), Industry Baby (Lil Nas X feat. Jack Harlow), Oxytocin (Billie Eilish), Just a waste (Pink Pantheress), Pop Star (Coco & Clair Clair), Kokomo, IN (Japanese Breakfast), Play The Greatest Hits (Wolf Alice), Fake ID (Riton, Kah-Lo), That Funny Feeling (Phoebe Bridgers), Goca Dünya (Altin Gün), Set it on Fire (Blood Cultures), The Private Dining Room Of The Police Commissioner (Alexandre Desplat), Patchwork (Laurie Spiegel), How Dare You Want More (Bleachers), Stavisky (Générique) (Steven Sondheim), Soñando De Ti (Part Time)

TV I LOVED: Feel Good (s. 1+2), Can’t Get You Out of My Head, I May Destroy You, Broad City (s.1) and Succession (s.3)

Deathloop is the game I had most fun playing this year. Traversing through it reminded me of my teenage years sprinting through multiplayer maps; where danger could be anywhere but every move was thrilling. Each of its levels seem small at first but grow in size, detail and intricacy as you replay them, like one string wrapped into a huge ball of yarn. It’s a game made of a dozen existing ideas and mechanics (the powers from Dishonoured, the time-loop clue-gathering of The Outer Wilds, and the PvP of Dark Souls to name a few) but does so in a way that feels exciting. It makes a case for this kind of iterative creation, of what the best result of it can be. I found myself dreaming up other games as I went through. I hope its success encourages other AAA studios to go out and make something just as specific in its texture.

I don’t quite know what my relationship to theatre is anymore, which is weird because this is probably the most active and “successful” I’ve been. I see fewer shows and feel less in touch or interested in searching out stuff. I think some of that will change next year (touch wood) but nothing quite feels right rn. The amount of organisations that have done pretty awful things especially compounds this. I don’t have anything to say that hasn’t already been said. Just that it bears repeating that it doesn’t have to be like this.

I love Tim Rogers and I loved his two long-form reviews of Tokimeki Memorial and Cyberpunk 2077. His videos pull and tear what we expect a video game review into a strange, loud and personal new form. I’m not a fan of super long videos but Rogers’ work is the exception. Each of his Action Button Reviews have an album-like quality, where you can go back to certain sections you like/parts you weren’t fond of the first time with new understanding. They are at once a video game review, a memoir, a post-joycean language work-out and a wider cultural critique. Both videos are fascinating critiques about its specific game, the context within which they arose, and the effect they have had on Rogers, all rendered in bright visuals, classical music and maximalist text. They always go in unexpected directions. Like the best long experiences, they are a journey. If ‘content’ is an unmistakable part of our culture, then Rogers is one of the people showing how far it can be pushed, and maybe, how good it can be.

I waited eagerly for the third season of Succession. Watching it week by week felt odd after bingeing the last two series but I liked the ritual of it, the chance to digest and discuss the episode with friends week by week. I saw a lot of people online complaining about its slowness, and part of me feels that’s down to it’s serialised watching. My favourite episode was the eighth with its constant delivery of jaw-dropping moments. If I have one criticism it’s that this feels the most aware the show has been of its fanbase. The constant references to social media, the Nero/Sporus moment, the No Context-baiting of certain lines (Salome Wagaine wrote a great piece about that aspect here). Despite that, I thought it was good overall because Succession offers a lot to its viewers. Everything is multifaceted. Even when it’s slow, everything pays off.

Maybe content is so on my mind because the internet is changing. I don’t believe the Metaverse Facebook is pitching will happen, and Crypto is an undeniable scam/eco-disaster, but both feel like a harbinger of a new, unfamiliar internet. I’m interested in how theatre can respond to that content and form wise, if games can present a playful tech-alternative, if a new genuinely good art-form can arise from content. But I don’t know. The unknown of it worries me. Either way, I want to be less online next year. It’s numbing me. There are things I want to do, people to spend time with and places to go. I want my life to be more physical, not less.

I usually feel quite excited for the new year but right now I’m not sure. Everything that happened in 2020/21 has made it all feel more precarious. I hope you found you something you enjoyed this year at any rate. Everything is teetering on the edge, and it’s certainly harder to be optimistic, but I know the catastrophes that plague our lives will end. It might just take a little longer. I remember reading an interview/article about the cartoonist Simone Veil ending with a two-panel comic that I’ve thought about it a lot since. I’ve posted it below.

credit: simone veil

One day the sun will rise again. I know it will.

Happy new year x