New Kinds of Guys

A few words about guys who want to be different guys

“Lurker,” dir. Alex Russell

It’d been gnawing at me for a good while now, this feeling that there’s something going on with guys that I thought I recognized but couldn’t quite name. I couldn’t put a label on it, and I didn’t even know how to understand it. Calling it a breakdown of the social order is broad and alarming and true, but also not explanatory. You see, the thing I’ve been feeling, sensing, is that guys—a lot of guys at least, too many—have forgotten how to be human beings. Mensches, you know? This basic tenet of society, that at some level we are in it together because we recognize in each other a common humanity, it’s evaporated. I wonder if it was ever there in the first place, but I do feel it has developed over my lifetime, and especially over the last decade or so. The trouble is, I don’t understand it. I get all the stuff about modern technology, atomization, the widening wealth gap, etc. But it seems to me, there’s some other damage. Something not explained entirely by external macro forces. Something intrinsic to guys—a lot of guys at least, too many.

This week, I got turned on to the work of a mysterious Canadian YouTuber called The Elephant Graveyard. Marc Maron mentioned his videos in a podcast appearance, citing it during a conversation about the anti-woke comedy cadre led by Joe Rogan. Maron’s a guy with taste, I thought, and if he’s saying fucking YouTube videos are worth watching, they’re probably worth watching. And they’re worth watching. There are two key ones: “How Comedy Became a Dystopian Imperial Hell World,” a.k.a. “Comedy Czar”; and the recently released “How Comedy Was Destroyed by an Anti-Reality Doomsday Cult,” a.k.a. “Comedy Jonestown.”

First, it must be said: this guy, Mr. Graveyard, ol’ EG, he hates Joe Rogan. Loathes him. He speaks about Joe Rogan and the whole Austin scene in apocalyptic terms. What’s interesting, though, is that he sees the scene for what it is. In fact, he gets what’s going on, and he lays it out.

In “Comedy Czar”, Mr. G tells the story of Joe Rogan, a guy with a dad-sized hole in his heart, who wanted to be another kind of guy so bad that he turned to comedy, and even though he was bad at it, but he created an alternate reality for himself where he was that different, better kind of guy, and he believed in it so hard that he did, for all intents and purposes, become a whole new kind of guy. Except the problem with living in some fake reality is the bubble can be burst, and Joe will be revealed as just the same old guy he used to be, so he has pillars that hold up this reality where he’s a new guy, and that requires guys to uphold the pillars. Yes, guys. Guys who’ll take your abuse and laugh at your jokes and tell you you’re great and that you’re the best guy they know, and you’re rich and successful, and these guys, they want to be new guys, too, new guys like you, new guys who also have a dad hole to fill. So everyone congregates, and Joe becomes the Comedy Czar, the ruler over this empire of new guys. And that’s why comedy is shit now.

This is a summary of the video’s argument, using its own terminology and rhetorical repetition. It’s a video about guys wanting to be new guys. Such a straightforward idea, and universally understandable. Here it was, the explanation.

“Comedy Jonestown” takes these ideas further, about new guys, but about how those new guys became part of a project to literally destroy the world. The major wrinkle Mr. G adds here is the idea of getting the hell out of here, which is actually what all these new guys wanted to do before they drank the Kool-Aid, when they were just guys with dad-sized holes. These videos, taken together, clarify the nature of what’s going on right now, between people. Between guys.

In our neoliberal hellscape, where individuality has been sapped of its freedom-giving quality and rendered a matter of personal branding in a global marketplace of guys and goods, there’s also nothing to latch onto, socially speaking. This is bad on all kinds of levels, including our inability to meaningfully communicate (see: Eddington). It’s also bad on the specific level of guys with dad-sized holes. Those dad-sized holes, they’re just not going to fill themselves, but that’s where Rogan and his gang of podcasting guys come in. These guys, they’ve all successfully become new guys, just look at them! This is what you want to be if you’re just some guy with a dad-sized hole.

The insight here is not the funny application of the word “guys.” It’s the dynamic identified, in which the transactional nature of so many modern relationships has incentivized these sorts of destructive personality transformations. And it’s not the transformation that’s troubling, but the new realities that must be created and upheld in order to sustain the fiction. It’s all these guys with dad-sized holes who just want to get the hell out of here and become new guys, so they join the cult, where there’s a whole different reality. And that reality is detached from real reality. It’s a hyperreality. These guys are so powerful, and their appeal has given them political weight, which has been exploited by propagandists who help construct the new reality in the direction that suits them. It’s literally destroying the world as we speak.

Last night, I went to an advance screening of the new movie Lurker, the debut feature from writer-director Alex Russell. It’s about a young guy who meets a pop star on-the-rise at the clothing boutique he works at. The young guy sort of weasels his way into the pop star’s posse, and you start to understand there’s a lot more going on here. A thriller about the relationship between celebrity and fan in an online world defined by parasocial exploitation. It’s a really good, smart, well-made film that’s funny and insightful and doesn’t get too big for its britches. And it delivers. In good part thanks to some excellent performances, particularly the one from the Lurker himself, Théodore Pellerin. Québec’s own! I had already seen Lurker, months ago, on a screener link. I was excited to see it again, properly, in a theatre. It played very well. Better even than the first time, especially getting to enjoy it with a theatre actually laughing at the film’s dark humour.

Seeing it a second time, after having watched Mr. G’s videos, I found my mind fixated on his theory of new guys. Here you’ve got this creepy guy, raised by his grandmother—hello, dad-sized hole!—who wants to be a new guy so bad that he intrudes into the life of this other guy who’s got his own dad and mom-sized holes, who’s already managed to create a new reality and become a new guy. He’s got his own cult of supporters, his posse, who he subtly and not-so-subtly manipulates in order to maintain the pillars of his new reality, lest it all collapse on him. In fact, there’s an MLM quality about it all, with all these new guys competing against each other for power in the hierarchy of guys in the fake reality they’ve created. The only hope they have in the end is to partner up in the maintenance of the new reality, and then they can be new guys forever. Fuck real reality, and the world.

And that’s what’s going on. It’s all the tech and all the economics and all of that stuff, but it’s also the dad-sized holes and that give guys the desire to get the hell out of here and become a new guy. It’s a deranging condition, perfectly ripe, and vulnerable to exploitation. It’s an inhuman condition, literally, in that it forgoes one’s own humanity and denies the humanity of others by departing from reality. Who a person actually is in their soul doesn’t matter, because if it did, becoming a new guy wouldn’t be possible. So it’s evil, too. And it succeeds more and more, the more that evil is spread. The more people buy into the idea that becoming a new kind of guy will solve their problems, fill that dad-sized hole, the more reality tilts in that antisocial direction. Even those of us who see through the fake reality must contend with it. Must live in it.

Yesterday, I also watched the new episode of The Adam Friedland Show, with guest Ritchie Torres, the congressman from the Bronx, and one of the loudest pro-Israel voices on the Democratic side. It takes about 40 minutes into the episode before they get to the topic, but when they do, what happens is remarkable. Friedland, once the co-host of the Cumtown podcast, whose whole schtick is doing irony-poisoned and hilarious interviews with a range of guests, drops the irony and through visible nervousness attempts to reach Torres as a human being. He tries to understand what it was that inspired such devotion to Israel from this openly gay black Puerto Rican guy who grew up in the Bronx projects. Friendland, who is Jewish and grew up partly in South Africa and lived briefly in Israel as a teenager, then tries to relate to Torres what it’s been like for him as a Jewish person to watch as a country that has the Jewish star, the Magen David, on its flag commits genocide ostensibly in his name.

It’s a painful appeal that Friedland makes, and I know it all too well. There’s debate to be had about various contentious facts of the situation, or theories about how best to end things and forge a better future. But that becomes a distraction from the core issue.

“I’m telling you as a Jew right now that we are receiving a lot more hate because of what the people with the flag that has a Jewish star on it are doing to other people right now,” Friedland says. “I’m telling you, as a Jewish person … how painful it is for us to say, and it hurts my stomach to say this—and you’re gonna say ‘I disagree, I disagree’—that this is a genocide. And that hurts to say that a Jew could do that. It hurts because we grew up with learning about what hatred is. We grew up learning about this. And the same year the state of Israel was established, 1948, the world saw the Holocuast, and they established standards for what a genocide is. It was the same year. And the world said this shouldn’t be a thing that happens.”

To this, Friedland is met with snark from Torres, who cannot allow himself to recognize the display of pure humanity in front of him.

Still, Friedland persists in the human appeal. He describes what it means to have a father born in 1951, just a few years after people were coming out of concentratin camps looking like skeletons, if they survived at all. “It terrified us,” he says, explaining that this was all wrapped up in his Zionist education as a child, teaching him he had to defend Israel. Then he describes having lived there. “I lived there, and I went to a settlement at the end of my year there, and I looked down the hill at a Palestinian village and I saw how they lived, and I turned back and I looked at the settlement and saw how they lived. And people live in a world where they're demeaned and dehumanized and surveiled constantly by people—and this isn't in Gaza—by people in SWAT team outfits with semi-automatic weapons. And that's what the world is seeing.”

He continues, getting only more emotional, “Me saying this to you right now will hurt people in my own family, okay. Because this is a very important thing to us. And the fact that I still fucking care about being Jewish is embarrassing. I should just be a guy [ed. note: there it is]. But this feels like a stain on our history, and it feels like it's changed what being Jewish is. Because what being Jewish is isn't Israel. Judaism has existed for 4,000 years. This is a country for 75 years. You know, it is one of the oldest monotheistic religions. Anti-semitism is one of the oldest forms of hatred. People in my life are going to be mad at me about this, but I'm saying this because I am Jewish.”

All this, and again he’s met by ugly inhumanity from Torres, who treats the whole thing like a gotcha interview rather than an opportunity to hear from someone who lives the experience of being torn between community, and history, and the horrible reality he can’t ignore. But you see, Torres isn’t operating in the same reality. He’s constructed his own reality. He’s another guy, one of those guys with a dad-sized hole, who grew up in a terrible situation and found a way to get himself the hell out of there and construct a new reality where he could be a new guy. And that new reality made him vulnerable, and he got taken advantage of by the Israel lobby, who flew him out on a Disneyland vacation to Israel for his first ever trip overseas. Israel was, in some senses, the reality he got himself away to. It’s one of his pillars. To watch it fall would be to watch his reality crumble and his new guy personality die. He’s not even comfortable with questions about his quite inspiring coming out story, which Friedland unsuccessfully tries to get him to open up about earlier in the interview. He can’t own that part of himself because that’s the guy he used to be, not the new guy he is now. His humanity can’t be allowed to show. Of course he can’t recognize the humanity in Friedland, or the humanity in Palestinians for that matter. There is no space for humanity in the fake reality of the new guy. Hello, fascism.