Why am I writing this, and why now?
In 2018 I got stuck on the idea that creating things to be shared on the internet was an unhealthy practice, that I was wagering too much of my worth on notifications and feeding an addiction to slot machine feeds. So I mostly stopped doing it altogether. I’m still wary of platforms that need me more than I need them. But it’s been a more complicated change than I expected, and I’ve found that keeping my photos, jokes, and opinions to myself didn’t magically heal me the way I hoped it would. So I’m writing this because I think there’s probably some middle ground between finding joy in sharing and desperately needing all of you to thank me for sharing. Or maybe I’m writing this because I want to hear someone tell me they liked it. I’ll figure it out later. I’m writing this because I want to. I hope that’s enough for now.
Anyways, here’s what you came for: Minding the Gap is the best film of 2018, and Celeste is the best game. I am well aware that it didn’t air in 2018, but I haven’t seen a better episode of television since I watched Nathan for You’s finale, Finding Frances.
Nathan for You is a reality show in that it revels in both the beauty and the terror of honesty. Finding Frances exemplifies this by giving us more of Bill Heath, a Bill Gates impersonator who is very bad at his job, than we could possibly have asked for, but the entire series is a masterclass in celebrating human oddity. Throughout four seasons of brilliant television, Nathan delights in the generosity of his interviewees, who gladly share their fullest, most challenging selves with him. He is simultaneously flat, warm, and persistent, consistently managing to find the most insane questions his guests will say “yes” to. In the second half of Finding Frances, partway through a seemingly doomed search for Bill’s long-lost love, Nathan finally shares himself with us in a way he had previously only asked others to do.
Alone and bored while the investigation is stalled in Arkansas, Nathan develops a relationship with a woman named Maci, an escort that he initially hired to give Bill practice talking with a woman. Nathan and Maci’s relationship develops about as naturally as one could with cameras following it — he shows her a couple episodes of the show (her review: “kind of mean”), they take a walk in a park, he dances for her in a hotel room before kissing her. He claims that the lines between the show and his life are blurring as he sees her more frequently. Four seasons of absurd but TV-friendly attempts at gaining approval (the show is packed full of his insecurity: he pitifully asks guests he’s just humiliated if they’d want to hang out sometime, goes to great lengths to receive obviously fake love, and regularly revisits a guest who apparently hates his guts) conclude, simply enough, with someone being paid to show him affection. The validation that Nathan (the character, the creator, whatever) sought is finally being provided in a way that highlights his own inability to distinguish performance from reality.
They do ultimately find Bill’s old flame, though she speaks with them only on the phone and without any indication of remembering Bill the way he remembers her. The last we see of him, he is on a date with someone else. Where Bill is content to let go of his love in the end, Nathan finds himself in need of closure, so the episode’s final scene is a reunion with Maci. It’s hard not to hope that this signals a change in him, a decision to pursue something earnestly. When they meet, she asks Nathan if he’d like to dismiss his camera crew, giving him a choice between documenting this moment and just sharing it with her. His response, heartbreakingly stiff, is to tell her that they rented a drone for this scene. The romance of a last-ditch cross-country flight crumbles when we realize that this sweeping aerial view of their meeting is really all he’s here for; reality is subsumed by TV after all. The shot, which undermines Nathan’s seemingly romantic gesture, is the perfect end to a perfect show about how hard it is to tell the difference between performing for attention and receiving affection.
I stopped using Instagram in 2018 because I was struggling to distinguish between sharing a photo and submitting it for approval. I have to admit I miss the thrill of sending something I created out into the world and waiting to see if it might elicit a small gasp from an acquaintance or a stranger; that suspense (and, hopefully, its payoff) is what drives me to create. But I’m afraid of living a performance rather than a life, and as a result, my use of the app was stilted: I made a lazy joke about wanting attention, shared some old photos, got inspired by the terrific Liana Finck, promptly co-opted her style without directly referencing her (I regret this), and edited a ton of new photos, some of which I still love, none of which I shared. Now I feel sad when I look at my camera. Twitter was easier to quit, but the narrative is similar: I shared some updates about a failed project, made more lazy jokes about my need for external validation, then decided there were probably better things for me to read on the toilet. Now I just text occasional lukewarm takes and inane one-liners to a handful of friends.
Quitting Facebook, which as far as I can tell is now just an unending sea of friendship anniversary animations, didn’t take much thought at all, and the decision has since been validated by a handful of public scandals. Without Facebook and Twitter, I assumed that my horizons would be widened. Though they’ve seemingly reshaped the entire world, these platforms are advertising companies above all else, and they’re built on top of feedback loops that keep our attention by giving us more of what we already like. So in addition to seeking a break from what often feels like an intrinsically unhealthy attention casino, I was looking forward to an unfiltered view of the internet. Ironically, in the year I said goodbye to Zuckerberg, I only really visited three different websites. There was a fourth, but it was far, far more bold and beautiful than we deserved, and now it’s gone.
Above all else, I had earnestly hoped that time away from social media would soften my desire for external validation. The idea was to avoid neurosis by avoiding performance. Instead, I felt anxiety more acutely than I can remember feeling it since I went through puberty. In 2018 I began eating lunch alone at my desk because I was suddenly afraid to navigate my workplace’s lunchroom; on multiple occasions I lied about feeling sick in order to skip out on plans; I sent my sister a letter so emotionally incoherent she had to call me to ask what its thesis was; I needed hours of decompression to untie knots in my stomach after getting a single beer with coworkers. Lately I’ve caught myself re-enacting interactions under my breath immediately after they end, repeatedly pantomiming a polite greeting that I’m worried wasn’t normal enough as I walk down the sidewalk so that maybe I’ll be ready to do it right next time.
It’s hard to say if my digital abstinence and newfound social terror are related. Even if it’s just a coincidence, what I’m saying is that 2018 was, in many ways, a year of regression. This sort of instability — not to mention the “am I okay?” type of fear that comes with an awareness of it — is almost certainly why something like Celeste feels so important. Celeste is an absolutely brutal game, but it backs up its difficulty with design that makes triumph feel earned instead of predestined. This game about climbing a mountain is really a game about failing to climb a mountain over and over again, because you can’t get good at climbing without being bad at climbing first.
But this game about failing to climb a mountain is really a game about learning to live with yourself when you’re accustomed to fighting yourself (the mountain is a metaphor, if you can believe it). Madeline is the game’s protagonist, but because she’s wracked with self-doubt and anxiety, she is also its antagonist. This isn’t interpretation, by the way: Celeste makes a literal, corporeal villain out of the parts of Madeline’s psyche that tell her she isn’t strong enough to reach the peak, that act primarily on fear, pain, and regret. It’s not the world’s cleverest metaphor or the world’s most unique story, but it’s small, encouraging, and exactly what I needed when I played it. And it’s the only game I can remember whose climax results in the hero apologizing to the villain (I wish I could think of others, but hey, that’s video games for ya!).
It may be simple, but Celeste isn’t easy in any sense of the word. Madeline takes the hard path to the summit — the one that involves confronting and reconciling with her fear — and so do we, restarting again and again due to countless tiny miscalculations and slips of our sweaty thumbs. But when failure is pain-free and checkpoints are frequent, learning by trying makes sense. Each screen starts as a puzzle and becomes an exercise: you plan, you prod at your plan through execution, and you perfect your execution through repetition. Often, in the more convoluted stages, these phases of learning feed into each other enough to reward both upfront brainstorming and adhoc improvisation. Celeste demands that you nail the fundamentals but wants you to surprise it. And since it’s got the most pitch-perfect platforming feel since Super Mario Odyssey, every practice run that ends in failure is still intrinsically valuable. Also, oh me, oh my, please listen to the soundtrack while you work and read and drive and sleep, and play it at my funeral if you don’t mind.
It’s tempting to think that feeling comfortable with myself could be as straightforward as climbing a mountain. I frequently fall into the trap of believing that a well-articulated goal, when accomplished, will build an identity for me and allow me to stop worrying about who I am, as if trying out yoga, or running more often, or deleting Instagram, or writing some self-indulgent essay might just blot out all the uncertainty in my life. After all, it’s a whole lot easier to know whether you did, in fact, take a run today than it is to know whether your relationship with that friend from college who you only text every six months or so is “still okay.” Video game protagonists, be they literally or figuratively flat, have this going for them: they don’t really have that much to worry about.
That shortcoming is exactly the difference between the best game of the year and the best film of the year. Where Celeste wants you to solve problems to move forward, Minding the Gap knows that you’ll move forward regardless of whether your problems are solved. This film is difficult to praise, because it’s a whole lot of things. As succinctly as I can put it, it’s a cinéma vérité documentary about skateboarding, domestic abuse, and the baggage we accrue as life keeps happening to us.
Following the director, Bing Liu, and two of his friends, Keire and Zack, over the course of several years, Minding the Gap is a celebration of practices that provide structure to lives that need it and a condemnation of trauma left unexamined. In 90 minutes, the film’s three subjects do little more than grow up, but in their growth we see hints of vast and complex narratives. It almost warrants a comparison to Magnolia, though where PTA used fiction to hint at a big idea, Liu uses reality to ground us in the effects of abstract, systemic patterns. Liu’s direction is hands-on and genuine, and his relationships with Keire and Zack allow him to take the film deep into their specific insecurities and flaws — not to mention his own — and then to further draw the lines that connect that brokenness to the broken homes they were raised in.
For the film’s subjects, these aren’t problems to solve, or even to overcome. These are questions that linger with them whose answers are never complete but always growing in correctness. We don’t get a lot of closure, even if Keire did get sponsored, even if Zack stops drinking and reconciles with his family, even if Bing gets an Oscar (fingers crossed). But closure isn’t what we should expect, because the point is how the conflict itself shapes a life. In one delirious sequence, Keire fails to hold back tears as he stumbles through a graveyard, hunting for his abusive father’s grave. At the same time, Zack sits alone and hopes aloud that his son doesn’t grow up to be anything like he is. At the same time, Bing sits behind a camera, seemingly miles away from his mother as he interviews her, and asks her whether she knew that as a child he was beaten relentlessly by her ex husband.
Consistently, though, they skate. In Minding the Gap, it’s clear that skateboarding is an escape — from their homes and even from Rockford, IL — but it’s also a foundation. It’s something to have control over, a way to carve out time and space for creative expression. It’s humbling too, a means of understanding what a body can and can’t endure. It’s a safe and welcoming way to live, at least for three people who have a hard time feeling safe and welcome otherwise. It’s a way to excel, to fail, to fly. Yet nothing I write here is going to convey what skating is for Bing, Keire, and Zack better than the lightweight grandeur of the film’s first three minutes. Just go watch it.
Liu wants to look closely at things that make him uncomfortable, and he wants us to join him. He is not content to just move on. Minding the Gap is a testament to the fact that searching ourselves and our loved ones with tender honesty is immensely difficult but equally rewarding. The film insists that this difficulty is what life is made of.
A month into 2019, I’m less confident in my own well-being than I was a year ago, and I’m starting to think this is just what growing up feels like. It’d be easy to just celebrate what went well and set new goals for the coming year, but if I don’t take the time to examine the parts of me that are hard to stomach, they’ll go unexamined forever. After all, the definitive art from the past year is art that looks at the self with loving scrutiny, that discourages hiding behind performance and asks us to see ourselves as more than what we’ve done. So I’ll try to make the simple, hard decisions from here on out, the ones that build relationships instead of flee from them and that address ugliness instead of overlooking it.
Here’s one: I got engaged in 2018. A year from now I’ll be married to a woman I love, who I still can’t believe loves me. As a result, I’ve doubled the size of my family, I’ve been in touch with people I haven’t spoken to in years, and I’ve felt such deep gratitude for my friends that I can hardly speak when I’m around them anymore. As beautiful and truly good as this is, it doesn’t solve my problems; it gives me new contexts in which to better understand those problems. I am still me, no matter how lucky I get or how anxious I feel, and if I don’t open myself up, no one else will. Partway through 2018, I hung a note above my desk asking two simple questions, hoping to inspire some healthy change: “Who do you want to be? Who are you right now?” I plan on taking it down, because even if I change, the answers to those questions won’t. This is the most potent and confusing lesson I’ve learned in the last year, and I want to internalize it. I also want to externalize it. That’s why I’m writing this.