“It’s kind of hard to get people excited about concrete,” the American filmmaker John Wilson complains to a cement mason midway through his first feature-length documentary, The History of Concrete, whose title does admittedly suggest the comic tedium of an old Monty Python bit. “Well, people don’t realise we’d be up a creek without concrete,” the man responds. “It’s used for everything.”
He’s biased, but not without a point. Concrete is fascinating. Love or loathe it, the humble mixture of cement, sand, water and stone binds our lives together, a cold, hard ecosystem as essential to maintaining the city’s precarious balance as much as its mythical social fabric.
Did you know, for instance, that there are concrete conventions – or, to be accurate, mixers? Organisations advocating for women in concrete? A movement to lay concrete on the moon, with urine as a mixer in lieu of the lunar body’s non-existent water, because, as one concrete evangelist asserts in the film, “We need to live on the moon before we can go to Mars.”
As viewers of Wilson’s charmingly offbeat HBO show How to with John Wilson will be well aware, the filmmaker’s premises are, if not quite a misdirection, then a jumping-off point for a rambling odyssey through all manner of human life, one that typically leads its creator and narrator down a series of unexpected, revelatory and sometimes very moving detours.
Across three memorable seasons from 2020-23, the show took concepts ostensibly banal – “How to Make Small Talk”, “How to Cover Your Furniture”, “How to Clean Your Ears” – and transformed them into an unlikely array of stories that indulged culture high and low. Each featured gentle reflections on existence, nested within layers of wry absurdity.
Episodes about tracking a delivery package or remembering your dreams took Wilson to cult-like cryogenic freezing summits and tender Avatar support groups; a wine-tasting crash course led to the welcoming munificence of an energy drink entrepreneur; an attempt to master the art of watching sports – maybe the show’s hardest How to – became an invitation to a clandestine vacuum cleaner meet-up, and then a touching meditation on grief.
Wilson has become one of the sharpest – and of course, funniest – chroniclers of modern American life, someone attuned to a world that has gone beyond the point of absurdity.
A kind of documentary of its own making, The History of Concrete finds Wilson at a personal impasse. His HBO series has concluded and with only offers of adult diaper and burger commercials on his upcoming slate, he feels like he’s fallen through the cracks – and soon starts to fixate on those in the city streets of his home town, New York.
Wilson uses his downtime to attend a Writers Guild workshop on how to pen a Hallmark Channel movie – “Now is not the time for Ken Burns,” the instructor tells the class, amid other rules for mastering successful romantic cheese – and finds himself watching a title in which the hero is a purveyor of affordable housing, a veritable prince of concrete. It’s embarrassing to know so little about something so ubiquitous, Wilson surmises. After all, it’s the second-most used substance on the planet, after water. And so it tumbles, on through Wilson’s signature byways and unlikely narrative permutations.
He supposedly blows his project’s entire budget on visiting Rome, where the fabled concrete of the ancient masters still holds up, but no Italian he speaks to appears willing to reveal its special sauce. He’d have been better off asking one of the city’s wax museum celebrities, such as “Elvis Prezzel”, as the mannequin King of Rock’n’Roll announces himself in an unsettling robotic monotone.
Back in New York, he hangs out with a “gum-buster”, a friendly dude who makes a living vaporising the remnants of chewed-up confection – which he likens to human bird shit – that splatter the city’s footpaths. He heads to Ohio, home of both the nation’s oldest concrete street and its shortest. He attends a fancy GQ dinner to honour Kim Kardashian and learns about diarrhoea accidents at a Brooklyn pool – the two moments are unrelated – which require a precise 25-and-a-half hours of cleaning to eliminate any danger of contamination.
The additional half hour remains, despite Wilson’s interrogation of a staff member, a mystery for the ages.
Though couched in the language of online comedy, armchair philosophy and corporate training videos – with legendary electronic composer Suzanne Ciani supplying a witty, burbling score – in many ways The History of Concrete is less a parody of documentary filmmaking than a genuine inquiry into human behaviour, made all the more effective for embracing the formalism of its moment.
Wilson finds poetry in the absurd, the visual pun, the cheap joke – Buttsville and Titman roads are accorded their close-ups – while his portraits of community are, at their best, like Frederick Wiseman tableaux spiked with Werner Herzog’s fictive provocation. He’s cine-literate, but also not above taking a pop at drone camerawork and other documentary clichés – the same worthless material that comprises the bulk of so many major film festivals.
In its affable wandering, the film ranges across everything from city planning and overdevelopment to the ethics of historical preservation, which becomes a compelling dialogue on just what things in culture are worth keeping and who gets to decide.
In one scene, Wilson speaks to a young man whose trade is preserving the tattoos from the skin of the deceased. “When you treat cultural artefacts like poker chips,” Wilson muses, over a shot of poker chips embedded in cement, “it’s hard to know what will happen when the casino shuts down.” It’s the sort of off-kilter, faux-homespun wisdom in which he specialises; philosophy that hits because it refuses to take itself seriously.
As someone who has a collection of ceramic E. T. sculptures among his prized possessions, Wilson is never one to pass judgement on his subjects, nor to approach apparent eccentrics with condescension or quirk. His work is driven by a genuine curiosity, even as his Ridgewood, Queens, home base threatens to raise the spectre of hipster tourism. Case in point: a beautiful sequence in which he visits an expansive concrete convention in New Orleans, where the attendant bricklayers are serenaded by a singer belting out “The Star-Spangled Banner” ahead of a contest to compete for a coveted ute, a scene that reminded me of the great 1997 documentary Hands on a Hardbody. The camera drinks in the moment without snark, taking in the skewed splendour, the silliness, the sublime.
Alongside his show’s executive producer Nathan Fielder, Wilson has become one of the sharpest – and of course, funniest – chroniclers of modern American life, someone attuned to a world that has gone beyond the point of absurdity, who understands that fact and fiction in the current era are blurry at best and interchangeable at worst.
Fielder may be a little more slippery, more meta in his construction, but Wilson is a master at hiding the seams. His work is sprinkled with autobiographical details, while his signature second-person narration is strangely intimate, conflating filmmaker and audience until his voice feels like the monologue in your head. It imbues his work with both a sincerity and the deceptive sheen of such: if we’re never quite sure what’s real and what might be staged, it’s because the distinction is irrelevant.
If anything, The History of Concrete might be too much of a good thing. At almost four times the length of a regular How to instalment, the film loops around on itself perhaps once too often and the narrative’s final passage – as affecting as it is – becomes almost predictably unpredictable within the rhythm of the work. Still, you want to relish every moment, every amusing little paradox, to embrace – and this is surely the mark of a great work – every weird and wonderful perspective, however divergent.
“You have never once questioned this material before, but everything you’ve learnt so far made you feel we were in danger somehow,” Wilson reflects at the concrete convention, watching in slight dismay as its patrons dance a conga line, lost in the jubilation of a life lived for cement. “But everyone here seemed to be in a state of bliss.”
Whatever your take on concrete, we’re all headed for an eternity adjacent to a slab – and maybe even, progress and urine willing, on the moon.
The History of Concrete is screening in cinemas nationally.
ARTS DIARY
PHOTOGRAPHY Angela Tiatia: The Matildas
Newcastle Art Gallery, Awabakal and Worimi Country, until February 7
MULTMEDIA Kate Cooper: Infection Drivers and Untitled (After Somatic Aliasing)
Institute of Modern Art, Meanjin/Brisbane, until December 20
INSTALLATION David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)
Carriageworks, Warrang/Sydney, until January 24
CINEMA British Film Festival
Palace Electric Cinemas, Ngambri/Canberra, October 28–November 29
Ballina Fair Cinemas, Byron Bay, October 28–November 29
EXHIBITION Energies 26
Home of the Arts, Yugambeh Country/Gold Coast, until February 5
Last Chance
VISUAL ART Joanna Lamb: A Romance in 2-Dimensions
Art Collective WA, Whadjuk Noongar Country/Perth, until October 24
Luke Goodsell is a writer, editor and festival programmer.