Camellia Peebles
There is a documentary out this week that claims to be about concrete. It is not about concrete. Concrete is the bait — the dull, gray, contractually-protected pretext John Wilson uses to talk you into sitting through a hundred minutes about something far more uncomfortable: what it costs to be an artist nobody wants to pay.
The History of Concrete is Wilson’s feature debut, following the finale of his cult HBO series How To with John Wilson, and it arrives wearing the same disguise all his work wears. The premise is a bit. He announces that he will make the definitive documentary on concrete, and to sell it he will build it on the industry-approved Hallmark formula, because that is what gets financed. Only, absolutely no one wanted to fund a film about concrete, but that didn’t stop John Wilson. What follows is a hundred minutes of watching that promise fail on purpose. You will keep asking where the Hallmark movie is. That is the joke. The missing movie is missing because it was never going to exist, and the space where it should be is where the real film lives.
For a while it plays as pure digression, and gloriously so. Wilson has the best eye in nonfiction for the thing happening at the edge of the frame — the black circles pocking the sidewalk outside every subway that turn out to be decades of flattened gum, the competitive bricklaying circuit, the concrete convention in Las Vegas where he is made to sign a clause promising he will not portray concrete in a negative way, a sentence he turns over with beautiful confusion. He goes to Rome and blows half his budget on the Pantheon, the oldest concrete still standing, a dome that has outlasted nearly everything humans have built since. He notes, almost in passing, that the manufacture of this beloved material is among the largest sources of carbon emissions on earth. The bit keeps tipping, quietly, into weight.
And then, somewhere past the hour mark, the disguise slips off entirely, and the movie you have actually been watching stands up. It is a movie about the struggle of the working artist and the particular disappointment that shadows even the ones who succeed. Wilson cannot get anyone to finance his concrete film. He is an Emmy nominee. He has been to the Grammys, to a GQ party, to the glossy rooms where cultural prestige is handed out. And he is buried under a landlord dispute worth nearly half a million dollars, in a building where the tenants are on rent strike, living in the dark, after the management installed fake fire alarms and other phantom code violations. A man celebrated by the industry and unable to make it pay. That gap — between the applause and the bank account — is the film’s true subject, and it is a class argument whether Wilson names it as one or not.
I should say plainly where I stand in relation to this film, because it changes what I am able to see in it. I am the person it is about. I am a working artist who has not yet landed, putting out more work than I can count for shocking little money. The starving artist is not a metaphor or a costume. It is a budget. Wilson and I are the same figure standing on different rungs: he has himself and a Rolodex of good connections earned off an Emmy-nominated show, and I have myself and a few excellent editors, and we have both arrived, by different roads, at the same threadbare consolation — that you keep making the work because the work is the thing, even when no one is buying.
Where the film and I part ways is on what that consolation means. Wilson comes across as an existentialist. His answer, arrived at through a late and genuinely moving detour I will not spoil, is that nothing lasts, and so you must put meaning into things to make them matter; the meaning is manufactured, deliberate, an act of will against the void. I do not believe that. I think nothing matters inherently and I make art anyway, which is a colder room to stand in than his. So, I watched a film tell me, sincerely, that my labor is redeemed by the significance I choose to assign it, and I was not persuaded — and being not-persuaded, from inside the exact life the film is describing, is the most honest response I can offer it. The movie is not wrong because I disagree. It is just making a case I can’t yet sign.
The film’s prettiest move is also its most slippery, and it is worth naming. Wilson lingers on the Buddhist monks who spend hours laying intricate sand mandalas only to sweep them away and lets the image carry the idea that suffering is an inherent part of life and impermanence is a kind of peace. But he sets this directly against the people in his own film fighting access to affordable housing, against a vote going the wrong way, against tenants in the dark. The monks choose to erase their beauty. The tenants did not choose to suffer. Dressing involuntary, structural, policy-made suffering in the robes of voluntary spiritual impermanence is the one place the film gets comfortable, and it should not be comfortable there. Suffering imposed by a housing vote is not the same as suffering surrendered to on a cushion, and the mandala cannot hold both.
By the end, Wilson has stopped pretending. The concrete isn’t a ruse. It’s seasoning sprinkled throughout. The Hallmark movie never came — however, its workshop did. What we do instead is follow John Wilson talking, over his own gorgeous, scavenged footage, about whether making a thing that will not last is worth the making — and landing, for himself, on yes. I left it turning over the question he could not answer for me, only for himself: will I ever make it, or am I only doing this to force meaning into an existence that has none, because nothing lasts anyway? He put his meaning in on purpose. I am still not sure the option is available to me. That uncertainty is not a flaw in the film. It may be the truest thing it gave me.
If you want a documentary that sprinkles a little concrete into a beautiful mishmash of grief, wine, gum, Rome, interesting camera shot choices, and the quiet economics of being uncelebrated while celebrated and learning new facts about DMX, you will love it. Wilson narrates the film in that flat, searching voice, and the wandering is the point. It is good. It got to me, which is the most damning and most generous thing a critic like me — broke, unlanded, still going — can say about a movie like this.
