{"id":12397,"date":"2015-04-05T23:58:24","date_gmt":"2015-04-06T03:58:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wework.com\/creator\/?p=12365"},"modified":"2020-03-30T18:39:29","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T22:39:29","slug":"into-the-wilderness-downtown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wework.com\/ideas\/professional-development\/into-the-wilderness-downtown","title":{"rendered":"The nostalgia of ‘The Wilderness Downtown’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maybe you’ve seen the 2010 short film The Wilderness Downtown<\/em><\/a>, which is both a long-form video for the Arcade Fire song “We Used to Wait” and an advertisement for the Google Chrome browser\u2014the only browser on which it can be watched. When you fire up the film, a search bar invites you to enter your childhood address; the coding then uses Google Maps to customize the video to include images of your boyhood or girlhood home, set to Arcade Fire’s music. The whole experience absolutely destroys me. I cried the first time I watched it, and I am always reluctant to go back to the movie, knowing that for some time after viewing it I will walk around in a state of nostalgia veering into melancholy, useless to anyone.<\/p>\n

During the experience of watching The Wilderness Downtown<\/em>, I can never think very clearly about why it affects me so. Only afterward, hours later or even the next day, when I have some distance on it, am I able to parse the experience. In those hangover moments, I have come up with the theory, a not altogether pleasant one: while most art mobilizes the spectator (or listener, or reader)\u2014to think, to interrogate the experience, to go forth and create\u2014The Wilderness Downtown<\/em> stuns the watcher, freezes him. It’s paralytic. By impersonating your own vision\u2014pretending to be you, looking at an old house that only an earlier version of you (pretty much) knows as your own\u2014the camera tells you how to feel. And so it short-circuits the feelings you might otherwise have.<\/p>\n

In an interview shortly after the movie was made,\u00a0Chris Milk, the filmmaker, alluded to his own discomfort with what he had done. “Honestly,” he said, “I’m not sure music videos can ever really touch you as deeply as music alone can. Music scores your life. You interact with it. It becomes the soundtrack to that one summer with that one girl. Music videos are very concrete and rigid because they rely on someone else’s vision. Sometimes mine.”<\/p>\n

That’s true enough, but Milk falls short of a full diagnosis. He has not entirely grasped what he has done in the case of The Wilderness Downtown. <\/em>Most music videos rob the watcher of the ability to evoke her own scenes to accompany the music; The Wilderness Downtown<\/em> offers a sense of autonomy\u2014after all, it gives you back your childhood, which is exhilarating\u2014but then stifles it, because nostalgia, longing, memory, can be a prison.<\/p>\n

Memory can be freeing, of course: Close your eyes, and your memory will riff on what your house looked like, and in that improvisation new stories, new fictions, can emerge. Improving<\/em> on our memories, erasing and redrawing them, is one of the great sources of art. It’s what storytellers do. But reliving our memories, exactingly<\/em>, which The Wilderness\u00a0Downtown<\/em><\/em>\u00a0comes perilously close to facilitating, is numbing. This movie is an opiate: You crave it, knowing that you will crash afterwards, and no matter what the old, washed-out man on the corner, insufficiently dressed against the cold, tries to tell you, it will get you no closer to finishing the work at hand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe you’ve seen the 2010 short film The Wilderness Downtown, which is both a long-form video for the Arcade Fire song “We Used to Wait” and an advertisement for the Google Chrome browser\u2014the only browser on which it can be watched. 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