Smug Conspiracism

Concerning The Shrouds, The Rehearsal, Wolves-Lakers Round 1, and Savannah Bananas Great Replacement Theory

My favorite things I watched this week, in no particular order, were David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, the first two episodes of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, and the Minnesota Timberwolves beating the Los Angeles Lakers in five games. All three works touch, in some meaningful way, on what we might call conspiratorial thinking; if you’d prefer a less charged word, you could call it the great debate between the extent to which the world around us is predetermined rather than subject to a series of structured spontaneities.

To the extent that you’re worried about this sort of thing, we can get spoilers out of the way: A) The Shrouds concerns a Cronenbergian stand-in whose grief in the wake of his late wife’s passing leads to his developing a budding high-tech graveyard empire offering next-of-kin the ability to watch their loved ones’ bodies decompose in real time, whose respectable, stylish obsession spins into the paranoid as he begins to notice microscopic growths on his wife’s decaying bones and his flagship graveyard is vandalized. The plot meanders—think a thriller on Xanax and two glasses of red wine—the widower-protagonist sleeps with not one but two beautiful women (which, good for you, David), before the film more or less dissipates in a way not dissimilar to Slothrop’s disintegration in the back portion of Gravity’s Rainbow. B) The Rehearsal, two episodes into its second season, is somehow even more labyrinthian: Nathan Fielder casts the viewer as co-conspirator in a patently unbelievable, outrageous quest to blow as much of David Zaslav’s money as possible.¹ Where this season purports to have a more overt mission statement than the first—Fielder is concerned with preventing airplane crashes by putting airplane first assistants into Rehearsal-style role-playing scenarios to seemingly build their confrontation skills, having determined that the majority of passenger jet crashes stem from first assistants’ inability to stand up to boorish or sloppy pilots—it’s already begun to veer into the metatextual territory one has come to expect from Fielder. C) In the first round of the Western Conference playoffs, the Timberwolves beat the Lakers four games to one. Anthony Edwards further established himself as the American basketball aura-bearer, Rudy Gobert perfected a redemption arc, LeBron looked old, JJ Redick crashed out, and Luka Doncic gained roughly five pounds.

Before going any further, I feel a need to clarify that I am not, constitutionally speaking, anti-conspiracy. I am, relatively speaking, a pretty insane person—a guy whose worldview might be understood as “slightly less crazy than his girlfriend thinks he is, slightly more crazy than she’d like him to be.” Put otherwise: I believe the CIA killed John F. Kennedy, but I won’t, like, talk about it at a party anymore. Like many others on what is ostensibly “the American left,” (yikes) I developed a passing interest in parapolitics in 2020 in the wake of my own politics failing, a sense of aggrievedness toward what I identified as bodies of power, and tremendous boredom. Podcasts, regrettably, had something to do with with it. It’s less that I now disbelieve that certain structures of power exist and exert tremendous influence over daily life and more that being able to, like, go to bars again has led to my being way less doctrinaire and way more normal about it.

I say all of this to say: I think unfettered access to the late-algorithmic internet has led to a minor schizophrenic crisis among internet users. I’m not going to support this assertion with examples—you either see people suggesting that Druski is a deep state asset or you don’t, and if you don’t you really should not bother yourself with this sort of stuff—because reading through Twitter or Substack doesn’t make me feel good anymore. The dominant mode of thought as mediated on the internet is a certain smug conspiratorialism: everything, by the current framework, is evidence of Something Else, Something Bigger. As an overarching principle governing day-to-day take-craft, this instinct has an obvious allure. Certain modes of social-mediated communication prioritize and encourage sharing opinions on not just something but everything; smug conspiratorialism provides take artists with a sort of North Star. The same way a baseball fielder knows where to throw the ball if they find it coming their way on any given pitch, the social media user given to this sort of lazy paranoiac mapping can see the direction toward which all takes must flow. It’s why the Savannah Bananas cannot just be a goofball exhibition event you find distasteful, but must in fact be evidence of the slopification of everything, to cherry-pick just one instance.

Because I spend a lot of time on the corners of the internet that concern themselves with basketball, I find this lowbrow conspiratorialism particularly offensive come playoff-time. If March Madness fosters upsets and unpredictability, the NBA playoffs are more a grueling endurance sport through which the best of the best sort themselves; along the way, though, enough unforeseen left turns take place that there is in any given year a perfectly reasonable argument that the championship winners were, in fact, frauds who should be ashamed to hang that particular year’s banner in their arena. The playoffs, at their best, are operatic, sweeping, epic; they pit aura vs. the slob menace, youth vs. age, post-industrial grit vs. financialized grifting, and the Boston Celtics vs. liberal democracy. For some reason, though, it pains the overwhelming majority of online basketball fans to acknowledge this beauty; instead, they insist, with a cowardly tongue in their cheek, that the playoffs are rigged by Adam Silver. Basketball fandom’s smug conspiratorialism manifests itself first and foremost in a certain assuredness that calls will be made, interests will be protected, and markets will be prioritized that robs all joy from the actual discussion or viewing of basketball. With the zeal of a true believer, the superiority of a teacher’s pet, and the critical facilities of a sophomore, the fervent basketball conspiracist cares more about what games Scott Foster is refereeing than he does the privilege of witnessing fleeting greatness expressed at the highest level. Basketball conspiracies, like all of the laziest conspiracies, mistake the first principles of media and power analysis for some shady, unsubtle cabal.

Insofar as the Lakers are what basketball conspiracists what the CIA is to conspiracists writ large—deeply evil organizations that have actually participated in organized criminality, shaped the world in their wretched images, and put crosshairs on the heads of men in Dallas, yet still not the secret cause behind everything that happens at any given moment—it satisfied me greatly to watch their season end last night. Against mounting evidence that the Lakers were incompletely assembled, mismatched against the Wolves, and unable to compensate for either their glaring hole at center or their newly acquired superstar’s inability to defend, conspiracists condescendingly maintained that certain calls had been put in, that the league would not let their golden franchise or their golden boy go down early, that anyone seeing what was in front of them was falling for The Script. Let the death of the Lakers prove conclusively that these cynics were wrong; though they would be well-advised to lean into actually experiencing the joy of surprise as it manifests itself in even the most rigorous sporting format, my guess is that they will move onto another, equally tired agenda.

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Let’s call it a score settled. From whence, then, the sympathy for the conspiracist? The Shrouds offers a pretty sensible place to start. This is undeniably an odd movie…the first fifteen minutes feel as much the lead-in to a high-end porno as they do a late-period film from one of cinema’s greatest auteurs…and yet once it finds its rhythm, or more accurately once its rhythm imposes itself upon you, it reveals itself as one of the richest texts in recent memory. With plenty of love to Sinners—blockbusters are back, and we’re better off for it—The Shrouds is (say the line, Bart!) the true overstuffed film for our times. It’s not so much that Cronenberg bites off more than he can chew—conspiracy, international espionage, grief, technofuturism, AI, white men fetishizing Japan, jealousy, desire…—as much as it is he never intends to chew on anything. In The Shrouds, any number of explanations might suffice for the events as they transpire; fittingly, many explanations are in fact offered. Cronenberg, perceptively, chooses to fashion each said explanation with just enough weaknesses to render it insufficient. Structurally, then, The Shrouds emulates modern life in the way that it is concerned to the point of becoming overwhelmed while resisting any and all satisfying conclusions.

Among Cronenberg’s many successes with The Shrouds is his careful, caring rendition of the conspiracy theorist. Karsh, the directorial stand-in and protagonist, is despite his earthly success a man utterly confounded by the world changing around him. Karsh’s grief is literal—The Shrouds, mercifully, avoids the metaphorical flourishes that have sandbagged recent horror—as, presumably, was Cronenberg’s own in the wake of his late wife’s passing in 2017. And yet still, perhaps there’s a unifying theory of conspiracy here: conspiracy as a way of making sense of the world in the wake of intense grief—a cousin of paranoia, a child of obsession. Cronenberg does not disdain his conspiracy theorists as much as he turns his viewer into one, walking the audience into tidy explanation after another before abandoning the whole endeavor. You get it, is the point. And so, in the spirit of compassion, I’ll advance a theory: perhaps every conspiracist is in fact a griever, even if that which they grieve is nothing more than the world that made sense to them.

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If I’m lucky, I’ll get the chance to write at further length about The Rehearsal somewhere, so I’ll keep my thoughts here light: The Rehearsal is one of those serendipitous happenings so wonderful and (in the truest sense of the word) unbelievable that I feel the need to evangelize on its behalf. If the rationalists we’ve all heard so much about recently obsess over how an all-powerful AI will treat those who didn’t work to ensure its dominance, I secretly worry when we no longer get shows like The Rehearsal that those of us who did not sufficiently celebrate the show will be in some way punished. The fact that HBO gave this man the budget it did to create a show about how to keep airplanes from falling out of the sky just before airplanes did in fact start falling out of the sky is one of those historical accidents I’ll bore my children with.

But, let’s stay on theme here: conspiracy. Fielder is not explicitly concerned with the notion as such, but you can understand the show as a sort of meditation on the forces that inspire the instinct for conspiratorial thinking within us. Fielder’s elaborately-staged rehearsals create a sort of Truman Show-ian inverse for their subjects, who rather than uncovering a conspiracy meant to stage an artificial life around them are actually invited to build their own fake life. Of course, there’s this elephant in the room, which is the inescapable feeling that no matter what Fielder is the one getting over on the person he’s interacting with. But, still, The Rehearsal is a show populated not by conspiracists but by some of the least critical people Fielder could find— their willingness to take Fielder at his word and cooperate with his insanity is what makes the whole thing work; this week, I watched a man confess casually to having been banned from every major dating app and SeekingArrangements for something that he insists “wasn’t anything illegal.” But as with every other Fielder creation, the show inevitably ends up being about Fielder—more than anything else, about Fielder’s professed desire to understand the random mechanics of the world by obsessively mapping them out in his rehearsals. Of course, this is a comedy, and Fielder’s wit is an acerbic one, so you’re well-served being careful with his stated values…it’s when Nathan is at his most seemingly sincere that I’m most wary of being made a fool by him. And yet still The Rehearsal revolves so successfully around this universal human desire—the desire to know, honestly, how something’s going to go—that it works as something more profound than a cynical prank-fest. Point being: we all want to know what is going to happen, right? Maybe not always—of course not always, actually, because knowing everything that happens means knowing that one day even we will die, and that’s such a horrible thing to contemplate that it can set a funk over your whole day and that’s if you’re lucky. But before, like, asking someone on a date or making a risky move at work or investing in a volatile stock market or choosing how to spend a night, yeah, it would be great to know how it will end up, because we could avoid humiliation and save our precious time and in a meaningful way be safe from the unknown. Fielder gets this—he jokes at his own expense about it, but he doesn’t need to. It’s a sentiment that stands forcefully on its own. And so why, if we’d all like at some level to eliminate the randomness, or at least the prospect of unknown negativity, from our lives, dies The Rehearsal work only as a sort of morbid comedy? Well, of course, because trying to eliminate the sort of risk that makes us human—the sort of risk necessarily entailed by interacting with other humans—is to make us something less than human. All plan and no spontaneity isn’t just boring, The Rehearsal suggests: it’s insane. It can’t work—uncertainty can’t be eliminated. Try, and you’ll only fold in further upon the byzantine prison of your own making.²

Point being: at their most sympathetic, conspiracies are themselves attempts to eliminate uncertainty by rationalizing the unknown and drawing the connections between the naturally disparate. Of course, some things people call conspiracies are in fact descriptions of reality, others are close enough to be harmless, others are inconsequential, and others yet are so harmful that they ruin Thanksgiving forever. This is just a blog about a movie, a show, and a basketball series. And yet all three lead to an inescapable conclusion: no matter how confounding the world around you becomes, a retreat into totalizing paranoia robs you of an essential component of human experience. At their smuggest, conspiracies offer an easy way to control and explain one’s experience of the world; as nearly every adult knows, a well-lived life requires doing hard things.

1. In the first episode, Fielder spends what must have been millions of dollars to completely recreate a terminal of Houston’s George Bush Airport and populate it with actors playing realist portrayals of people who were actually observed in said terminal on a given day. The glorious role-playing exercise and tribute to waste allows Fielder to learn that first assistants typically do not speak to pilots before boarding an aircraft, something that he could have learned in at most three questions.

2. For what it’s worth, this is basically what I think is wrong with Boston Celtics fans, but that’s also a conversation for another day.