Patton Oswalt // AV Club
great interview; i love when someone i look up to vocalizes something ive been trying to figure out.
AVC: It’s funny, because the Internet likely played a hand in people coming across your work in the first place, but it also was how you and the rest of the world found out what they did. The Internet can foster so much creativity, but then it provides these shortcuts for those who aren’t willing to do their own work. It reminds me of what you wrote for Wired about the death of geek culture, how having everything at your fingertips kind of keeps you from having to do the work, whether it’s playing through a videogame without cheat codes or writing a graduation speech.
PO: [Laughs.] Yeah. Although, I don’t like being like, “Well, society’s over!” I mean, Socrates thought that society was over when they, mankind, invented writing … Definitely the search aspect of things has been truncated and I think that a lot of creativity comes during the search. In other words, when you’re going to look for the thing that you’re so obsessed with, you tend to go down little byways and alleyways and meet interesting people in looking for the object of your desire. But when it’s just a click away, that search, with all of its kind of attendant adventures and mishaps and dead ends and frustrations, that’s gone. And there’s a lot of creativity to be found in that search. And I think people are wistful for it, because the road trip movie is still very, very popular. The idea of being stranded and having your transportation options limited is still clearly romantic and appealing to people. Whereas in reality, with cell phones and all these geosynchronous map functions on everybody’s iPhone, it’s more of a chore to get lost than 10 years ago it was a chore to get yourself oriented.
There’s a very smart, but also kind of sad moment in the new Fright Night movie where the hero needs to go break into the vampire’s house to look around, and he just goes on his iPhone and gets a “How to pick a lock” app, which is very, very realistic. I mean, it was smart enough that they worked that into the movie, but you know, 10 years ago, you would have to find a shady character in the neighborhood or go down that road to find someone to teach him how to pick a lock. Which would be interesting. And now, that’s not part of it. And I would actually applaud the movie for embracing, “Well, no. Kids don’t do that anymore.” You can vaguely type a sentence of what you want into a computer and you can probably find what you need now. You don’t even need to be articulate.
AVC: You don’t even need to know what you want, exactly.
PO: Yeah. Just write, “Steampunk, boob, ninja,” and you’ll probably get what you’re looking for. I remember five years ago, I guess I just wanted to know—in movies, people are always stealing bearer bonds. A real thief doesn’t steal money, they steal bearer bonds. Which is, I guess, a shorthand way of a movie trying to tell you that [Whispering.] “We’ve done our research. We really know what the world is about.” So I was talking to an account manager saying, “Hey, how do bearer bonds work?” And so this person was explaining what they represent. And I go, “So why do people steal them in movies?” And this person went, “I don’t know because there haven’t been bearer bonds in 20 years.” A young accountant today wouldn’t know a bearer bond if they looked at it. Everything is electronic. And this person went off on this kind of interesting tangent about, “I think it makes movies sound smart when they say they’re stealing bearer bonds, but the one movie that’s actually been weirdly realistic about how heists work now is that bad movie called Swordfish, where they just go make some computer geek break in and steal stuff. Real, professional thieves don’t actually break into banks, they break into computer systems, ’cause that’s where all the money is.” And it was really interesting to hear that. Like, “Okay, someone’s gotta figure out how to make that interesting.” Cause that’s the new reality.
But, again, in that search, because I wasn’t that computer-literate, my first thought was, “Well, I should call someone up and see if they will go to lunch with me for an hour and talk to me.” So that was kind of interesting.
[…]
P.O. [On ‘experience’]: It took me until my 40s to realize it: There’s no destination. There’s no getting anywhere. There’s just the going. The key to life is to make the going really fun. Because people that are like, “If I just get to this, then boom!” And then they get there and there’s this dawning of an afterwards. Whereas I’m just always in the going. And it’s not a frantic going like, “I gotta keep going or I’m gonna go nuts!” I can not do anything for weeks or months if I need to and just sit and read books or watch movies. I’m just as fine consuming and absorbing new art as I am trying to make it. But it’s all in the going.
