In the inaugural column of Writer’s Corner, I focused on the great Nathan Rabin and his impact on me as a writer. More specifically, it helped explain what my intentions were with The Memory Tourist. I wanted to find a personal intersection where I was dealing with my life as it related to media, maybe with some sense of humor thrown in for good measure. I feel like my generation is starting to just now forge its path, defining what the previous decade was like for them. We finally have the writing tools to present our story in a meaningful way. My big issue is finding ways to explore it without becoming too saturated in nostalgia. It’s also the confidence to just go for whatever interests you.
And you know what? Going for everything has been a rewarding experience. Forcing yourself to write is a freeing experience when you reach the other side. You don’t think you can hit your 2,000-word count, but then an hour will pass and you have a full article that you can be proud of. Some of them play better than others, but I think forcing yourself to throw ideas onto a page allows your brain to be freer, to move further and potentially reach a higher plane of success. I saw this with Rabin, and I am hoping to reach something like that with The Memory Tourist. But first, I feel the need to spend this first month creating a reasonable path.
For instance, there is a strong chance that you’re wondering where the name Memory Tourist even came from. Did I make it up in a Mad Libs scramble for a title? In all honesty, I announced the website before I even had an idea of what to expect. It could’ve been called Me Old Bamboo for all I knew. I just needed to think long and hard about a title that actually held a deeper meaning.
I guess I justified calling my last website Optigrab because it started as a non-concept place for my writing. Later I kept the name because I saw websites like Pajiba, C.H.U.D., and Bad-Ass Digest and thought that a quirky name could go a long way to standing out. I still love Optigrab as a name, but I needed something that had a more coherent ring to it. If you had to do a group testing, ask yourself this “What do you think of when you think of Optigrab?” At best you think of eyewear. It’s the exact reason I gave this a more serious name.
After days of struggling to come up with a name that would help me stand out, I landed on the name that had been standing in front of me this whole time. The Memory Tourist is a reference to Don Hertzfeldt’s 2017 short World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts. Throughout the short, Emily Prime visits her childhood self and tells her of the bleak future that lies ahead. The young Emily spends most of it throwing out innocent comments, cutting through the sadness with absurd thoughts. At one point Emily Prime introduces “memory tourists” who wander around people’s thoughts and stare at them, trying to find a deeper meaning in what they see.
That was part of my Twitter bio for a while following the Vimeo release. I was obsessed with the short and saw it a dozen times in the one-week rental period. The world of Hertzfeldt has long been exciting to me, and I think he’s had something of a resurgence in recent years. In 2011, he began to release a trio of shorts depicting depression that would become the film It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012). This was followed by World of Tomorrow, which also scored him an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short. He also did one of the craziest couch gags for The Simpsons, which I’m sure anyone not familiar with Hertzfeldt immediately disregarded as incoherent trash.
That is why it’s difficult to pick a point to talk about Hertzfeldt for the first of his many entries in this Writer’s Corner column. Because I love the guy, I can’t just blow my introduction on one of his classics. For starters, I wanted to begin talking about him in a way that’s accessible to you the readers. I am aware that you could rent the World of Tomorrow shorts on Vimeo, but when he has so many alternatives on YouTube I figure you’d better start with a tease. I also didn’t want to start with Rejected (2000), which is easily his most beloved 90s short and first Oscar-nominated work, because contrary to popular belief my anus is not bleeding.
I’m going with a different approach. I’m going to look through the animated shorts that he made his bones on and find one that holds some deeper emotional resonance.
You may ask yourself how the man who created Rejected has any deeper emotional resonance. It feels more like a dive into madness where the sense of not being accepted by others drives these stick figures crazy. Sure there is some deeper emotional resonance in that, but you’re so taken up in the absurd and surreal textures of the vignettes that you are likely to laugh amid horror as things become more grotesque. He has a love for the brutality that shines through in works like Wisdom Teeth (2010) and Billy’s Balloon (1998) that make you think that he’s only wanting to be cruel to his characters.
The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. By creating a world of stick figures, he’s leveling the playing field. He’s found a way to make us all equal as if drawn by a childlike perspective. It’s a subversive technique when he adds the other elements to the field. A sad stick figure is a curious creation whose minimal frame is barely hanging on. He’s evolved to make his shorts more of a wondrous collage fusing together styles, but his early work was the result of a man who painstakingly drew these cartoons by hand to tell stories reflecting his own unique sense of loneliness.
While animation technique may not be considered “writing,” it does plenty to convey character on a deeper level. For instance, compare Lily & Jim (1997) to any other animated movie. Disney is so molded in an aesthetic beauty that you recognize how they convey emotions and actions. Stick figures don’t have that ability. It takes more effort to create stories that make you understand them on a deeper level. Their smile is nothing but a line with two lifeless eyes. It strips the potential of animation down to its core. Sure, Billy’s Balloon can get away with abusing a child because of this, but think of it on a more complex level.
That is why I’m starting with Lily & Jim, which is one of the few early shorts that escapes the absurdism in favor of something resembling a more familiar story. Lily and Jim are two people about to go on a date. There are interstitial interviews where each confronts the audience, stating their personal desires for the date and the inherent loneliness. They believe that finding a soulmate could make life less miserable.
But, what if there was never a soulmate? What if this was all a terrible waste of time and we’re just wasting time with each other? The short builds to an awkward dinner date at a place called Chez Food. It’s a wonderfully crass and stupid name (it translates to “Food’s House”) that only enhances how ridiculous this all is. They sit opposite each other and, in one rare moment we get thought bubbles. They want to say something sexy, alluring, witty, and all they can come up with is talking about the Holocaust and Jim’s father’s intestinal failures. Neither seems to be reciprocating the information, but it stumbles along amid the silence.
They trudge along in hopes of finding a deeper meaning to this evening. Jim says he has allergies to caffeine but drinks coffee just to give himself something to do. There is no sense that Lily or Jim love each other, but they also have nobody else to be with. They’re desperate and their apathetic nature only makes them more likely to be stuck in their situation. The stick figure forms work here because of how affectless they are. There’s no reason to pay attention to a twinkle in their eye or a jerk in their arm. They’re trying to find meaning in life without coming anywhere close.
Whereas you can look at everything else that Hertzfeldt did around this time and see a provocative animator, you could watch Lily & Jim and find an artist expressing their deeper intentions. For the first time, it was clear that he was wanting to become existential and tackle heavier subjects than Billy getting assaulted by a balloon. He wanted to use the minimalism to better express how humanity works on its core, drained of any flourishes that you’d find in every other animator. Hertzfeldt wasn’t going for novelty. He was going for something so cerebral that it feels like even 25 years in he’s only reaching his true potential.
The thing that’s important to know is that Hertzfeldt did all of this by hand. While he hired voice actors Robert May and Karin Anger, it is reported that he did most of the rest himself. He drew over 10,000 drawings for this 12-minute short that was his third student film at U.C. Santa Barbara. The effort speaks for itself as every frame radiates with life. Even the choice to animate the awkward silence as characters doing these small tics showed that he was wanting more than quick gags. He wanted to create realism in animated form, where long pauses make a moment land better. There is a reason that this got picked up by MTV’s Cartoon Sushi alongside Hertzfeldt’s second short Genre (1996). It resonated in its rough form, reflecting growing angst for the people who were trying to figure out their own identity and if they would survive.
While I was a child in the 1990s, I can’t say that most of it resonates on the same level that the 2000s did. This is just a matter of what moments stand out more to me. Even then, there are moments where I look back at the crude nihilism of 90s culture and find it to be this fascinating time capsule. It felt so dangerous and carefree. It’s what helps make something like Beavis and Butthead make sense. Even then, it’s quite something to think of Hertzfeldt coming from that time, branching from the nihilism and finding a deeper point to where life is heading. Lily & Jim may be rooted in shock humor, but it’s more to point out the internal loneliness of people who don’t feel like they’ll ever do any better.
I chose this as my first Hertzfeldt short to cover because it’s too intimidating to just jump into It’s Such a Beautiful Day or the World of Tomorrow series. I feel that I need to start somewhere less polished, of an artist still trying to find their bearings in the world. Nowhere is that more apparent than feeling useless and like you’ll never do better than the moment you’re in right now. You want only the best for Lily & Jim, but their circumstances blur the line between hilarious and tragic. There was no reason for Jim to drink that coffee, but he did out of intimidation to be loved. There could’ve been better ways to communicate that. Instead, it all ends with uninspired conversations passing the time. Is this the next phase of their life?
In the clever ending, Jim comments about how condiment packages have a long shelf life until they’re opened. Once they are, they expire quickly. His life is like that, but how? Is the meaning that he’s about to expire his life with Lily or is this date going to end and he moves onto another hopeless fling? It’s a cliffhanger that makes you think and an early example of how brilliant Hertzfeldt’s gift as a storyteller truly is. It’s not just in an avant-garde animation style. It’s also in the subtext of his Generation X prose on the realities of dating. Are we all going to be in loveless marriages, or will life be better? When you're young, it's hard to really know.
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