The Elephant In The Data Center

There’s a hoary old joke about the circus.

A guy is watching the elephant cage and sees a humble man in the back corner, scrubbing away. As the man scours a particularly vicious spot, the elephant lets loose with a torrent of garbage-green pachyderm diarrhea. It’s gross. It’s everywhere. The man rinses his mop and commences to start his laborious task anew. He grabs a hose and sprays the elephant, which causes the enormous animal distress, which the animal relieves by spraying a firehose of urine at the poor janitor.

Now completely overwhelmed by this task, the cleaner leans against the bars of the cage and sticks his head out, lighting a cigarette. The guy watching from the crowd says “Hey buddy, looks like tough work.” And the janitor says “This job is horrible. Horrible. I’m covered in elephant shit and piss every day and I think sometimes when I leave at night I’m more covered in dung than when I came in.”

The man pauses and says, “Why don’t you just quit? That sounds awful!”

And the janitor replies, “What, and leave show business?”

---

I have subscriber fatigue.

I have so many subscriptions I don’t watch. I don’t remember the last time I put on a movie on Shudder. I don’t know why my wife needs Peacock but I assume it has something to do with either Real Housewives or Natasha Lyonne, neither of which my wife can get enough thereof.

When I do decide to finally put something on, then, why is it invariably a documentary about the making of a movie?

We have access to the entirety of human communication, more or less, at the touch of a button.

Well, at the touch of a lot of buttons.

There are a lot of remotes.

But still.

I am sitting here watching The Making of Night of the Creeps.

I could be watching Tarkovsky. I could be watching the mid-70s period of Pasolini, or Bela Tarr or Bunuel’s surrealistic classics.

This is a movie that is best known for the line “I have good news and bad news. The good news is your boyfriends are here. The bad news is they’re dead.”

We cut the cord. We did it a while ago. And like an inverse Occam’s Razor, once you cut the cord, within a few months you will find that your bills actually totally increase.

I did a cursory examination of our subscriptions. Here’s what I came up with, just in the creative disciplines:

Amazon Prime, Apple One, Disney Plus, Google Play, Peacock, Plex, various Substacks, Google Fiber, Netflix, HBO Max née Max, Shudder, BritBox (I do not know or remember when I decided to get BritBox).

This does not include subscriptions to SAAS services I use for work, or entertainment-adjacent things like infrastructure, or arguably money-saving subscriptions like Door Dash or Uber Eats or god forbid Blue Apron or, or…

I can cancel all of these. In reviewing them, though, there is always some stupid reason to keep each one. They’re like people from your hometown you keep around on Facebook because you might need them for “marketing” some day.

Listen, all these Subscriptions don’t come from nowhere. You have to actually invite them in, like Swedish vampires.

But what is the sense of having all these subscriptions to resources for movies if I then just watch the Special Features instead.

I’ve watched all six hours of special making-of features on Batman Begins. I don’t even like the movie that much.

I’ve watched every interview on my HD copy of John Carpenter’s The Thing. There are two entire separate documentaries, such is the nerdlike need to absorb every detail.

I’m like Gollum in the Lord of the Rings. My precious! Hoarding and guarding the lost knowledge of the ages, or at least what was in the last issue of Mojo.

---

And so I tackled the Tales of the Darkside DVD collection.

This was a show produced by Night of the Living Dead’s George Romero and his production partner Richard Rubenstein in the mid-80s.

The series was a take on the anthology format set up by Creepshow but in tribute to the EC horror comics of the 1950s. Much like the shortly thereafter produced Tales from the Crypt series on HBO.

Romero’s show took small stories by the likes of Robert Bloch and Stephen King and John Cheever, and made little bubble movies – simple, usually one location. Character actors like Keenan Wynn (“What is this, the Shaggy DA??” my brain screams), Danny Aiello, Lou Jacobi, Farley Granger.

But instead I’m noticing things like the director of photography on many of these episodes is a pre-Spike Lee Ernest Dickerson.

Jodie Foster directed an episode?

In one particularly memorable episode, “A Case of the Stubborns,” Preston Sturges’ everyman Eddie Bracken plays a grandfather who is clearly on his last legs, but refuses to admit it. Even after the rotting smell starts to annoy the family. Little Christian Slater plays his grandson. Future Data from Star Trek: TNG Brent Spiner shows up as a preacher.

As much as I love the little story, and its subtly gory denouement, I am tickled by the details more.

I read the IMDB entry. The Wikipedia entry. Not even Wikipedia has the level of information I need.

“Who decided not to put Donald Rubinstein in these credits?”

Is this a dude thing? This captivation with secret stats and connections?

Simon Baron-Cohen writes about systemizing (order, stats, dudes) vs empathizing (emotions, drama, girls) as gendered ideas, but he also writes about the relationship between systemizing and autism, and peculiar cross-matching with male thinking patterns and neurodivergence.

Given that his surname is too close to the actor who played Borat, I choose to take this with a grain of salt.

Also, apparently, people with autism don’t like this man or his ideas.

But I get the vague overlap between obsession with numerical and text statistics and perceptions of the neurodivergent.

Everyone’s neurodivergent now. I am too, probably.

---

I can’t quite, for the life of me, figure out why I never went into film production.

I love movies, always did. Read about them voraciously.

I think my fascination with the minutiae of film is because I never truly believed I could actually work in film. Some small town impostor syndrome holding me back.

I thought early on I could make a go of being a film critic. Then music.

I never got into production because by the time I’d figured out what I might be good at, it was too late to make the jump to the necessarily lower rung of production.

I watched my friends get roles and crew calls, Chris Slater in Jingle All The Way or Doug Jones getting a swing gang gig on Dario Argento’s horror noir Trauma.

(Which, due to its being shot in Minneapolis, fortunately got us an invite to the Xmas party where I met Argento himself and his then 16 year old daughter Asia Argento.)

I recently found a stack of zines that Doug and I did in the early 90s, called Flat Bed.

Even then I was swinging at my filmic ambitions.

I remember telling my friend Barbara Stone, who was leading the San Francisco Film Festival at the time, that I wanted to be the world expert on horror films. She thought that was a fairly achievable thing, bless her. She didn’t comment on it being virtually unsustainable.

And so here I am years later, watching Bruce Campbell explain how Sam Raimi beat him with sticks in a documentary about the making of Evil Dead II.

During the day I do my tech startup rigamarole. To pay for all these subscriptions.

It’s not always easy, but what do you want me to do? Quit technology?

---

This is Are You Experienced. Nick Tangborn is me. The main investors in Monty Python and the Holy Grail were Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson, among others. Clapper/loader on the film was Roger Pratt who would go on to shoot Tim Burton’s Batman. This is what it’s like inside my head 24/7.

Reach out at nicholas@areyouexperienced.co