One thing that you might not know about me is that one of my all-time favorite bands is They Might Be Giants. I don’t spend a lot of time worrying over top-10 lists; one of the consequences of reading (and watching and listening) like a fox is that I’m more inclined to read an 11th book than to read one of my top 10 a third or fourth time.
But one of the ways that you might demonstrate my long-time affection for TMBG would be to go and look through my first book. Despite how many people approvingly cite Faulkner’s dictum to “kill all your darlings,” the fact is that most of us can’t help but let a few darlings sneak through. It’s kind of fun to catch these quirks in an academic text—one of mine is that I cite TMBG’s 1991 album Apollo 18 in my first chapter.
I had good reason, at least in my opinion. It was a footnote to a broader discussion about how technological change isn’t just about the “new.” Those changes also ripple backwards—my example in the body of the chapter was the way that there were a number of books coming out in the ‘90s and early ‘00s that used the conceit of hyperlinks to do all sorts of cross-referencing shenanigans. In other words, authors were rethinking what their books could accomplish in light of the (then) newish technology of interlinked webpages.
Why did I cite Apollo 18? Because it was the first album that I ever saw/owned that was designed specifically to be listened to on shuffle. CD players had only begun to really take hold of the music industry in the mid-80s—the year I got my first CD player was right around the time that CD sales began to outpace both vinyl and cassettes. And one of the ways that they distinguished CDs from those older formats was the ability to use the shuffle button. The CD for Apollo 18 came with eighteen 15-30 second sound clips that, when played on shuffle, would intersperse among the other, full length songs on the album.
[It’s a little beside the point here, but the shuffle button may be one of the secret villains in the story of how the album qua album declined in importance the way that it has. I used to show my digital writing students that scene from High Fidelity where John Cusack talks about the dynamics of making a mix tape. There are exceptions, yes, but we don’t listen to music in order very much any longer, not nearly to the degree that we did before the CD.]
Anyhow, back to TMBG. Their first studio album came out the year I graduated high school, and I didn’t really start listening to them until the next year (I think?). There were a few of us who were really into them, and that was especially true in my sophomore year.
One of the things you should know about Carleton, where I went to college, is that at the time it had a really active intramural sports culture there, and Ultimate frisbee was king (except in the dead of winter, when they flooded the quad for skating and a broomball/hockey rink). Every floor of every dorm (on a campus with very little off-campus housing) had its own intramural ultimate team. When it came time to name ours, we chose a song from that first TMBG album, called “Boat of Car.” Now, “Boat of Car” is an objectively horrible song, with the dubious virtues of being short and having pretty easy lyrics to remember:
I took my boat for a car
I took that car for a ride
I was trying to get somewhere
But now I'm following the traces of your fingernails
That run along the windshield
On the boat of car
But we were into it, because it was bad, I think. And so we decided to name our floor’s Ultimate team after it.
It gets better. We would bring a boombox to the field whenever we played another team, and each time we scored, we would fire up the song and sing it as a team. As annoying as it is to hear the opposing team’s fight song at a college football game where they’re running up the score? This was worse, i suspect. We were pretty good, and scored a lot. By the end of the season, there were other teams that wanted to play us just in the hopes of keeping us from scoring.
And we did this weird kind of culture jamming thing too. If there were a few of us eating a meal together in the cafeteria, we would sing the song, and then just go back to whatever we were doing or talking about at the time. One week, we created a handful of posters cued by the lyrics, made a bunch of copies at the library, and then posted them on bulletin boards in all of the other dorms. I specifically remember tracing my hand on a sheet of paper, giving that hand long fingernails, and writing out the fourth line of the song on it. I look back on that whole deal now and kind of just shake my head—I have no idea what we thought we were doing. I only know that it was fun, and that it’s left me with a lifelong fondness for that kind of weirdness.
All of which is a kind of mad prelude to the fact that this week, I tuned in to a new movie on AppleTV, Fingernails. It’s an odd little movie, one that begins from a speculative premise: what if there were a way that couples’ love could be scientifically tested, and verified? The main character, Anna, is a former elementary school teacher who’s in a relationship with Ryan. Their love has been confirmed by this test, but she remains unsatisfied with the answer, and ends up surreptitiously taking a job with the Institute that both conducts the test and prepares couples to take it. We learn early on from a public service poster in the Institute that “Heart symptoms first appear in the nail,” which signals both the movie’s vibe (that small, everyday interactions are symptoms are deeper things) and its title.
I don’t want to drift too far towards spoilers here, but I do want to think a little about that vibe, because it’s part of what made the movie odd for me. First, no small amount of my interest in the film is that it pitches as part of the subgenre of speculative, near-future work that, to my mind, was established (if not necessarily inaugurated) by Black Mirror. Many of that show’s episodes take a particular (technological) idea and extend it to its logical conclusion, and that’s some of what Fingernails does. Most of them position themselves “in the future,” but they take different strategies to do so.
Part of what’s odd about Fingernails is how muted that sense of future is. In many ways, it seems like present day, but there are a number of choices that make it feel like near-past. The most prominent music in the movie are two songs by Yaz (one of the eightiest bands that ever eightied), the clothes and cars and sets feel old, and the “machine” that diagnoses couples’ love looks like it could have come from the props department from the original Star Trek. For a fair bit of the movie, I half-expected the core conceit of the movie to be revealed at some point as a scam, to be honest. At the Institute, couples who come in for testing participate in a variety of activities and simulations which are meant (I think?) to prepare them to take the test. I’m struggling to describe exactly why these activities feel so off to me, but they feel kind of arbitrary and made-up, maybe? At one point, couples are asked to jump into a swimming pool, stay underwater for a minute, and stare into each others’ eyes, because it will help them associate a feeling of “breathlessness” with their partner. Okay…?
I guess part of my ambivalence was that it never felt like the movie took its conceit with the seriousness that I expected. For me, the best Black Mirror episodes, even when the idea or the setting was far-fetched, took it seriously enough for us to immerse ourselves in the prospect of it. That’s the source of some of my most intense responses to certain of the episodes. In the case of Fingernails, though, it’s difficult for me to say whether this is simply understated or intentionally treated as more of a backdrop for a different story entirely. Either way, though, the movie’s payoff felt a little ho-hum as a consequence.
As is sometimes the case when a movie fails to grip me, I watched it more in bits and pieces, and I found myself thinking much more about the premise when I wasn’t watching it. I don’t want to go into great detail about this, but it called to mind for me the emergence of matching algorithms as they’ve been deployed not only on dating sites (OKCupid, e.g.), but at Amazon, Netflix, et al. We tend to think of them at one scale: people who like this book, movie, or person will like this other thing because it shares many of the same traits. And that’s a fairly legitimate approach, for sure.
But sometimes, it’s wildly off. And that’s because, fundamentally, these algorithms can’t account for the ways that we come to like those original things. If I really wanted to think about it, I could give you a long list of the qualities and characteristics that I appreciate in a movie, and most of the shows that would top my personal list would manifest those qualities. Except that some of those qualities work against the idea of an algorithmic match: I like movies that challenge my perspective, show me things I’ve never seen (or thought about) before, tell stories I’d never think of myself, et al. There are lots of qualities on my list that are more conventional, of course, but my point is that my preferences (and most people’s, I’d guess) don’t cohere into a single, Platonic ideal. If they did, then we could just stop once we’d found that one perfect book, movie, tv show, album, or person. I’m a lifetime fan of TMBG, but there are a lot of artists I enjoy who are nothing like them.
There’s an old book by Herbert Simon that’s had a great deal of influence on how I think, called The Sciences of the Artificial. In that book, Simon coins a term that’s a portmanteau combining satisfy and suffice—he talks about how the best available option may not be perfect, but it satisfices. As the Wikipedia entry about the term explains, “Simon used satisficing to explain the behavior of decision makers under circumstances in which an optimal solution cannot be determined.”
My issue with matching algorithms isn’t that they satisfice, because honestly, I think that’s all they can do. In a very general way, I think they’re better than a coin flip for the most part. If there’s a problem with them, it’s that they offer us good enough answers (most of the time) while promising (or at least implying) the optimal. The degree to which we reflexively trust something that has been technologized or scientified is something that Tarleton Gillespie has written about. Gillespie’s larger point is that algorithms hide a great deal of sociality (or what I’m calling convention) behind their technical veneer, and to that extent, there is a mythical element (in the Barthesian sense) to algorithms that we haven’t really come to terms with.
[I have a whole other series of thoughts about how this connects to the hype surrounding AI, and the way that we’re being trained to treat “good enough” writing as the peak of human achievement, but this is already longer than I’d originally planned. So I’m going to set that on the back burner.]
Ultimately, that’s one of the messages (I think) that we might extract from Fingernails—that there’s a lot of pressure on us to accept satisfiction in place of something better—but that message is itself fairly understated as well. As a result, Fingernails was a movie that I had every reason to appreciate, except that it never quite got there for me. As I think I’ve demonstrated, ad nauseam, the associations that it provoked ended up being more compelling for me than the film itself. But that’s how it goes, sometimes.