Fishing and Painting with John

Fishing with John is a fishing show by and for people who don’t care about fishing, at least not in the grand scheme of things. The real story is the cosmos. But now that everything old is new again — or should that be everything you think is new is already old — we also have Painting with John, a painting show for people who don’t care about television.

Bob Ross died in 1995, but his legacy has only continued to grow. The Joy of Painting is a cult classic, available on a few streaming services, and Ross himself is iconic as a kind of philosopher-poet of what might be called the Fred Rogers school: gentle humanism driven by love of love for its own sake. On the other hand, if Bob Ross had produced and aired The Joy of Painting from Twin Peaks, we might have gotten something like Painting with John.

The first episode of Painting with John is rather heretically titled “Bob Ross Was Wrong”. In the episode, John Lurie says, “Bob Ross was wrong. Everybody can’t paint. It’s not true. So… it’s very optimistic to think everybody can. I think that everybody can paint when they’re young … and a lot of people it gets pounded out of you.” Lurie functions as a counterpoint to Ross’s aggressively form-driven landscape painting, producing quasi-abstract artworks while letting the show meander wherever it might. For Lurie, any sort of ability to paint is a misnomer because art is in the act, not the final product.

As a logical update to Fishing with John, there is a breath of fresh air in Painting with John, in part because it is wholly pointless. I stubbornly refuse to watch The Mandalorian, Game of Thrones, or WandaVision, knowing full well how much certain people want me to watch them, that I’m supposed to watch them, to inhabit their fandoms. Even the more palatable wave of low-key indie television — ranging from Louie to Master of None to Lady Dynamite — demands fealty to fandom. This approach fails to fully explain Painting with John.

Even if the self-referential auteur-performer formula seems well-done by now — noting that the shows that seemingly beat Painting with John to the artistic punch are indebted to Fishing with John — there’s something pitch-perfect about Painting with John, even beyond the exceptional music and the soft touch of the filmmaking. Seinfeld was a show about nothing, but Fishing and Painting with John are shows about everything as much as they are essentially shows about nothing in the Seinfeldian sense. For both series, the mundanity of day-to-day life is a veil, and it’s never entirely clear what lies behind it. These are cyberpunk documentaries about life in an all-encompassing simulation, and while Fishing-era John Lurie is blissfully unaware, Painting-era John Lurie gets it, at least on an unconscious level. Most importantly, neither John Lurie particularly cares; there’s fun to be had, after all.

But again, importantly, Painting with John, like Fishing with John, is unafraid to be utterly, truly nihilistic about its audience. It’s hard to name a series less aware that it has viewers. Not literally, of course; Fishing has a narrator and Painting utilizes Lurie’s direct addresses to camera. But on a deeper level, these are series that ask nothing of you, demand nothing of you. How you engage with John Lurie and his shows is entirely up to you. It’s not something seen often in pop culture (if Painting can be called “pop culture”; I guess being on HBO Max qualifies), and it hinges on a viewership willing to see beyond the interactions of objects in space.

It’s an approach borrowed from, among other sources, the American independent cinema. It’s easy to see in Fishing and Painting the influence of Jim Jarmusch, director of Permanent Vacation, Stranger Than Paradise, and Down By Law and longtime collaborator of John Lurie (Jarmusch himself appears in an episode of Fishing with John). Jarmusch’s early work in particular defies cinematic conventions through the jarring lack of clear signals to the audience. By not telling you how to feel or think, Jarmusch forces (enables?) the audience into a more active space. If people tune out, I’m sure Jarmusch is fine with that.

In this way, Fishing and Painting are embodiments of artistic egalitarianism, not without precedents (one of my favorite films, Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, comes to mind) but remarkable in their execution of such ideals. Both series prove that true verité is not gauged by politics or style or technique but by a more complicated relationship to the viewer and the psychic/somatic space that the film enables (forces?) the audience to enter.

Another good example is Michel Gondry’s Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?, a series of interviews with linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky set to Gondry’s animations. In the film, Gondry admits to letting the artifice and manipulation of the film become blatant precisely by animating it, a process no one could mistake for pure fact. In doing so, Gondry lets the audience set the tone for the encounter with Chomsky (and Gondry, whose flawed presence as an interviewer enriches the film immensely) and gets to a deeper reality than more obvious forms of “realism”. Again, viewers are permitted to tune out of Chomsky’s soft-spoken style and Gondry’s simplistic and repetitive animations.

Audiences are free to tune in to Lurie’s shows. But in a world of hyper-mediated content, they do so at their own psychic peril.