One of the most provocative and challenging films at Sundance was Rick Alverson’s Entertainment. Comedian Gregg Turkington stars as a comedian who performs his avant-garde act, and in between has seemingly random and mundane encounters. I took it as a challenge to what we consider entertainment and what we expect of performers, so I got to speak with Alverson about his film’s themes at the press and filmmaker reception on Main Street.
Check Out: Sundance 2015 Interview: ‘Entertainment’ Dissects Entertainment
CraveOnline: Are you asking the question, what do you we consider entertainment? What do we take for granted?
Rick Alverson: I haven’t thought of it that way but I guess if it needs to be reduced down.
Oh, I have more. It’s not reduced to just that.
I mean if it did need to be distilled down to a phrase or a question, that would function as well as any.
Did you come to any answers making the film?
Oh no. I have opinions. It was just about a process of masking those opinions. This is what, three films now have been active and engaged in a process of conversation with a form and an audience that in some regard doesn’t make entirely evident my intentions.
Would you share your opinions on entertainment?
I have. I’m very curious and profoundly disappointed with a particular status quo that conditions us to behave psychologically and even physically in a certain manner. I think that has a lot to do with passivity. Increasingly, I think we’re being conditioned to be passive in ways that we’re not even aware of. And I think that there’s a long tradition of this. This isn’t a social media problem. This is a problem of the commodity of a particular kind of [art].
I think I know what you’re talking about. I’ve been in the media for 15 years and a fan of it long before that. I know how images are manipulated and I don’t buy into certain things, like the rom-com idea of love, but I realized I still had confusion in my relationships because I’d been taught to always desire and try to consume someone.
That’s an interesting point because there isn’t often a conversation about how men are corrupted by media. I want to make movies about things that I’m wrestling with and find problematic. All of my life, masculinity and the way that it was presented to me and the conditions under which it was necessary to demonstrate certain attributes have always confounded me. I think that there are vulnerable individuals in every gender orientation.
That’s just one example of how someone as savvy as me can be susceptible to entertainment. There’s a documentary here about that, The Mask You Live In, so it was fresh on my mind. Are you also asking what do we expect out of our performers?
I’m sort of preoccupied with the act of viewing more than I am preoccupied with the act of performance. Filmmakers are viewers. We like to think of them as authors and hold them responsible for something. That’s a very safe position to be in when in fact they are viewers having a conversation with us through a medium and a form.
Back to this idea of passivity in viewers, this isn’t about politics. It’s about physiology. It’s about psychology and what happens with our senses, our minds and bodies when we imbibe a certain form. I think that that form can land on being palatable and commercial and equating those too things, and it takes off running with that. And then it’s just a matter for the consumer market to try to obscure those attributes. It’s like everybody likes to bust on rom-coms. Well, those characteristics aren’t obscured in rom-coms but there are so many they are obscured in.
I think as individuals that are locked in contained environments, in a safe setting and playground of the psychological environment like their living room or the cinema or these things. But passivity and being taught passivity and being conditioned to be passive in the world with our senses and our intellects. It’s very dangerous.
