David Foster Wallace Considers Netflix

Netflix’s distribution of films has gone from nine in 2015 (not including specials and shorts) to a planned 86 this year. It may seem normal now, but the cottage industry of direct-to-Netflix films is still quite new. Early on, most of these films were documentaries. Of the films in 2015, for instance, only two weren’t documentaries: Beasts of No Nation and The Ridiculous 6. While Beasts was warmly embraced, Ridiculous 6 was horrifically received. Netflix, though, decided that this was good and ran with it, growing its distribution to 28 films in 2016, 61 in 2017, and then to 86 in 2018.

One of those 86 films is Like Father, which popped into the catalogue just a couple weeks ago. It stars Kristen Bell, Kelsey Grammer, and Seth Rogen, all of whom are enjoyable to an inoffensive extent. The film positions itself as a comedy about an estranged daughter and father who bond during a cruise. Simple, straightforward, sweet.

But about 20 minutes into the film, we see the Royal Caribbean crown-and-anchor logo multiple times in quick succession, and it quickly becomes apparent: This otherwise bland film is also, essentially, an advertisement. This detached me from the movie as a viewer, but more than that, it disappointed me as a Netflix customer. There’s a particular sensation that comes from realizing that something you enjoy is actually an advertisement. But what is that sensation, exactly?

More than 20 years ago, David Foster Wallace published an epic essay about a cruise trip that might help to explain things. Most of it is about a seven-night cruise and the experiences that result from it. He devotes attention to a wide swath of topics, from the inherent unpleasantness of managed fun to the existential dread summoned by industrial-strength toilets. But most useful is his digression on an essay by Frank Conroy, about Conroy’s own experience on a cruise. On reading the piece, Wallace grows suspicious and phones Conroy, who admits that the writing isn’t serendipity—but rather an advertisement.

Wallace determines that “Celebrity Cruises is presenting Conroy’s review of his 7NC Cruise as an essay and not a commercial. This is extremely bad.” Why? He concludes that “since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill.”

Put it like this: Even when we’re presented with genuine art, we may resist it because we’ve been duped in the past.

What Wallace wrote applies to Netflix as much as it did, back then, to Celebrity Cruises. Like Father is narratively and creatively fine and harmless. The cast sets you up for a comedy (though I’d say that it’s more of a dramedy). Kristen and Kelsey deliver quite enjoyable performances. Yet as an item in Netflix’s catalogue, the film is arguably a harbinger, an avatar of worse to come. The cruise in the film isn’t once presented as anything other than amazing. The cost is never mentioned; all annoying aspects—like boarding—are edited out; all of the experiences are beautiful, fun, easy. I became suspicious early on in my viewing, and it turned out that that was justified. The film’s director, Lauren Miller Rogen, mentioned in an interview earlier this month that “Royal Caribbean came on super early as partners.”

To an extent, this shouldn’t be too surprising. After all, we live in a corporate world—a world of gargantuan tech companies and omni-channel retailers, a world of too-big-to-fail banks and Big Pharma. Indeed, ever since Benjamin Day began selling his audience’s attention with the Sun (New York) newspaper, money and companies have influenced the direction of art. Art’s specific purpose is to help us understand those realities, to see beyond daily life. But if we can’t earnestly create and appreciate art addressing our corporate surroundings, then we, as citizens, lack the tools to come to terms with our commodified world. And filmmakers, for their part, can’t earnestly create a film when that film’s setting is also the film’s branded partner, because that insulates the brand from being seen as a brand. In other words, it normalizes the unconscious and ongoing exposure to the logo. No longer brand, but lifestyle.

And that’s a shame. One of Netflix’s greatest strengths has been the sincere audience engagement it has encouraged. People identify with the complex inmates on Orange Is the New Black, with the glamorous women of GLOW, with the odd couple on Grace and Frankie. These products are praiseworthy in part because they’re an antidote to the Everyone Might Die storylines unspooled in so many blockbuster films. Netflix produces small stories about reasonably real people struggling through life with maybe just an inhuman amount of charm. And I put on Like Father hoping for a similarly low-key yet sincere experience.

The Wallacean reading of Like Father is that the movie invites me to see past my ironic detachment to cruises. It does this with the casting and a 20-minute cruise-less opening. But then the characters and the audience black out. By the time I’m coming to my commodified senses alongside our charming leads, I’m 20 percent of the way through the movie, and probably going to finish it. And by laughing with Kristen, Kelsey, and Seth, I accept the idiosyncrasies of the cruise experience, and I begin to accept that perhaps I, too, could have a good time on a cruise.

In that light, a film truly is the “perfect facsimile” of which DFW warned. It can be made bereft of negative experiences. And it’s a facsimile by its filmic nature. Wallace describes Conroy’s essay as “polished, powerful, impressive, clearly the best that money can buy.” The same can be said of Like Father’s casting and filming. “It presents itself as for my benefit.” For my entertainment. “It seems to care about me.” It wants to make me laugh, feel emotion. “But it doesn’t, not really, because first and foremost it wants something from me.” Yeah, my eyeballs. “So does the Cruise itself.” Yeah, my money.

Wallace knows what will happen on realizing all that: “[The perfect facsimile] makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”

Netflix has presented itself as something different from broadcast television. With a paid subscription, you can forgo the drip feed of entertainment, ratioed 8 minutes to 4 minutes of advertisements. You can get straight to the heart of the matter: entertainment. The implication was that Netflixian content would, in its own way, be more sincere. Artists would be liberated from commercial constraints. Like Father represents a terrifying return to the drip feed. Twenty minutes of film, four minutes of cruise montage. Rinse, repeat, end movie.

By the end of Like Father, I felt that perfect-facsimile despair—because I knew that I could no longer fully trust Netflix. There will now always be some degree of doubt.