Surf Dracula: On Buffet Infinity

Channel surfing is a cultural practice that has almost vanished, well it has for me at least. Like many people I no longer have a television that makes this activity possible, my television does not get channels, not really. I have a few streaming services, probably too many, and a Blu ray player. Yes it is possible for me to scour these services looking for something to watch. I cannot scroll absentmindedly through different channels, moving from movie, to rerun, to news broadcast, to nature channel, watching all of these disparate activities and events fill the same screen. At least I cannot do that at home, whenever I am in a hotel I indulge in this disappearing cultural practice. 

I truly believe that surfing is a kind of art form, a practice of digital collage. I say this because so many movies almost seem like they are less than the sum of their parts, best watched as a kind of highlight reel, of chases, fight scenes, and dinosaur attacks. Beyond this there is the practice of constructing a kind of mashup of movies or television shows, sometimes this is a matter of watching two movies on basic cable at once, flipping between them when one goes to commercial. Or it can be a matter of following some news story or sporting event, intercut with some television show. Everything and anything can become part of the assemblage of images.  I am reminded of the following passage from Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason, 

"The best prep school for Capital— would it not consist in watching television several hours a day, looking through several newspapers and magazines the remaining hours, and continuously listening to the radio? For basically, we can read Capital as often as we like and we will never understand the decisive point if we do not learn it from our own experience and if we have not sucked it into our own structure of thinking and way of feeling: We live in a world that brings things into false equations, produces false samenesses of form and false samenesses of values (pseudoequivalences) between everything and everyone, and thereby also achieves an intellectual disintegration and indifference in which people lose the ability to distinguish correct from false, important from unimportant, productive from destructive — because they are used to taking the one for the other."

I like this image of the screen, the television screen, as the visual equivalent of the commodity form. Just as the latter takes disparate and different use values, not just the famous linen, corn, and iron but also Apple watches and Labubu's, and renders them all equivalent, interchangeable, the screen takes all of the world from its fantasies of the mind to its existing horrors and makes them interchangable. I admit that my reading is perhaps more Debord than Sloterdijk. I was never really that influenced by his take, and only read his book when I was working on an essay on cynicism (more inspired by Deleuze, Guattari, and Virno) 

I still remember this passage, and it came to mind recently when I watched Buffet Infinity. Buffet Infinity is a movie that is told almost entirely through channel surfing, a late night session of surfing that focuses almost entirely on commercials and fragments of local news, the detritus that most people flip through. The movie begins with an established group of characters that are familiar to anyone who has watched television between the hours of midnight and six in the morning. We get a personal injury lawyer,  a mattress store, a used car dealership, and a pawn shop. It eventually becomes clear that something is wrong with Buffet Infinity. The new restaurant in the shopping center. This first become evident in a heated rivalry with a local sandwich shop, and then begins to show up as first pets and then people go missing. 

By the time we figure out what is happening with Buffet Infinity the slate of late night commercials begins to include a science fiction author turned self-help guru, life insurance, the local chamber of commerce, and commercials for people who are struggling with depression. As the film progresses some of these forces, the lawyer, the chamber of commerce, side with the Buffet Infinity of the film's title and its insatiable appetite for pets, people, and retail space, while others fight against it, like Jenny and her special sandwich sauce. While others, like Ahmed and his pawn shop, are just trying to stay alive and stay solvent. As things in the city take a dark turn Ahmed begins to advertise that his pawn shop sells guns as well as Blu Ray players, always adapting to changing market demands. 

Many have compared this film to SCTV with its love of local television, but, for those looking for a more recent comparison, one could think of Mr. Show and even Detroiters. There is plenty of humor in this film. However, I am tempted to think of its focus on screens and surfing in a different way. As early as the eighties, Deleuze saw the proliferation of screens as a fundamental challenge to film, to cinema. It is a fundamental transformation of the meaning of an image, no longer is an image of nature, of a world outside of itself, but the image becomes an image of images, the screen just shows us other screens. As Deleuze writes.“The modern world is that in which information has replaced nature.” As Deleuze argues this transformation happens when the screen becomes both medium and object, representation and represented. As he writes, 

"But when the frame or the screen functions as instrument panel, printing or computing table the image is constantly being cut into another image, being printed through a visible mesh, sliding over other images in ‘incessant stream of messages,’ and the shot itself is less like an eye than an overloaded brain endlessly absorbing information: it is the brain-information, brain-city couple which replaces that of eye nature.”

Forty years latter these words seem both prophetic and unheeded, with the exception of a few novelty films in horror, I am thinking of Unfriended, Missing, and Searching, movies have gone to great pains to avoid the simple fact that screens dominate modern life. This is an aesthetic problem as much as anything. Screens on screens is often visually boring, and hard to see. However, this avoidance of the prevalence of the screen in day to day life often feels like a creation of an alternate sort of reality, the same way that movies and television have for the most part avoided COVID, taking place, for the most part, in a world where it did not happen. 

 

Every Frame a Painting did a great video essay about the problem of the cellphone

An entire history could be written of attempts to solve, or avoid this problem. On the former we have Iron Man's heads up display, and the later we have Robert Eggers, who has made it clear that he has no interest making a movie with a cellphone in it. 

This brings me back to what I love so much about Budget Infinity. It captured not just the aesthetics of flipping channels, the fragments and pieces of a world rendered interchangeable as image, but the affect of it as well, especially in this world. The film conveys the sense that something horrible is happening, something that you can only partly see in hints and moments. Over the course of the film we generally see how the events off screen, the missing people, the odd expansion of the restaurant, the rifts in time and space, warp and distort the world around them, as they become part of the lawyer's advertisements and life insurance commercials. This seems to me to be an accurate image of capital, not just the rendering of every image interchangeable, but the fact that these images that we absentmindedly surf through are themselves fragments of, and distortions of, a much more brutal reality.