If you know anything about filmmaker John Wilson, you’ll intuit that his new documentary The History of Concrete is barely about concrete at all. Earlier this decade, Wilson’s HBO show, How To With John Wilson, provided a sometimes compelling, sometimes aggravating glimpse into the lives of ordinary New Yorkers, as well as into Wilson’s own woolly, discursive mode of thinking. In one episode, Wilson walked around a New York neighborhood until he saw an Italian flag, figuring that the person who’d hung it would know enough about Italian food to help him learn to cook risotto, which he wanted to make as a treat for his elderly, babushka’ed landlady.
In another installment, he sought ways to protect his furniture from his beloved yet destructive cat, and in so doing, stumbled upon an anti-circumcision activist, who in turn led him to a musician and inventor who’d developed a foreskin restoration device. (It was called the TLC Tugger.) In Wilson’s world, the phrase “One thing leads to another” takes on heightened meaning. He shifts gears according to who and what he encounters during the filmmaking process, which is how a simple quest to cover a chair can morph into an anxiety-riddled meditation on the possibility that maybe life is better uncut. The History of Concrete is essentially more of the same, though this time, Wilson’s observations are stretched out at a more leisurely pace, rather than pieced together into bite-sized segments.
Wilson begins by describing the ennui he felt after his show ended. He used to have a purpose; suddenly, he needed to both seek inspiration and drum up work. He describes unsavory moneymaking offers that have come his way, like doing Depend underwear ads with the Naked Cowboy—an easy No.
He laments his lack of direction. In his characteristic wry juxtaposition of filmed images and voiceover, he explains that he’d always been proud of taking “the road less traveled, where no one else would dare to voyage,” over grab-and-go footage of street signs that read “Buttzman Road” and “Titman Road.” He takes a WGA-sponsored workshop on how to write a successful Hallmark romance. Then, while doing home repairs—badly, he admits—he begins musing on the fact that concrete is everywhere.
Why not make a documentary about it? Wilson tries to sell his idea to a group of poker-faced potential supporters, each enclosed in a tidy little Zoom square. Somehow, the idea gets off the ground.
From there, Wilson explains the basics of this ubiquitous material. For example, he makes the distinction between cement—a component of concrete—and concrete itself, a mix of cement, water, sand, and stone. He travels to Rome, where he films examples of early Roman concrete and also visits a janky wax museum, because why not?
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