Jack Tame: Some things are (hopefully) worth the hype

Last month, I woke to a message on my phone with a link to a YouTube clip.   

It was a film teaser (not to be confused with the trailer).   

In the clip were two familiar faces. One was Nathan Fielder, a Canadian comedian and TV host. The other was Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced and now jailed founder of the blood testing company, Theranos. A woman notorious globally for one of the best-known scams of the modern age. 

The teaser was brilliant in its intensity and its simplicity. The two of them sat centimetres apart, staring into each other. Elizabeth Holmes made a strange, rhythmic movement with her head, but barely blinked, her giant eyes reaching maddeningly into her counterpart. 

“Why would I deceive you?” asks one of the best-known fraudsters on the planet. 

The frame cuts to a wide shot. As the two of them are locked in each other’s gaze we see what has been causing Holmes’ strange movement. She’s rocking a baby. The teaser ends. 

How do you know when something’s overhyped? We’ve all experienced it. Maybe you’ve read about a travel destination, or a restaurant, or someone has promised you an album or a TV show is the greatest thing ever, only for the reality to leave you underwhelmed. 

Hype can be a great thing. It can get you to watch or listen or experience something you might otherwise never have touched. But it can overcook things, too. Something you might have enjoyed perfectly well can end up being a bit of a letdown relative to your expectations. Hype —especially with something you already love— can be a bit of a dangerous phenomenon. 

I love Nathan Feilder’s work. If you’ve never heard of him, there’s probably no other person working in television who is harder to explain. He’s most often described as a comedian —I just did so myself— but I actually think his work has morphed into something else. He’s hosted a couple of his own TV shows. On ‘Nathan For You’ he found absurd and humorous solutions for businesses who were experiencing various problems. But his most recent show, 'The Rehearsal', has moved into something more akin to performance art.  

You’d just be forgiven for thinking after 70 or 80 years, there would be no truly original ideas left for TV genres: dramas, sit-coms, satires, documentaries, and reality. We’ve kind of done it all. But 'The Rehearsal' breaks new ground. It’s a mug’s game to even try and explain what it is, but the broad concept is that Nathan uses a huge HBO budget to help people rehearse for big moments in their lives.  

It’s such an intoxicating, mind-bending, twisted ride and I’ve found myself ranting and raving to anyone who’ll listen to me about it. I’m the hype guy.  

But now the shoe is on the other foot. 

The teaser clip for the film ‘You Can See Everything’ revealed that for the month right before she went to prison, one of the strangest characters in modern Silicon Valley lore invited the strangest creative in Hollywood to live in her home, with cameras rolling.  

And now that the film has been released, the hype couldn’t be greater.  

Here are a few samples of the kinds of reviews that most producers would chuck on a poster:

“Truly ingenious.”   

“A reality-splitting masterpiece.”  

 “A stunning re-evaluation of what documentaries are capable of.”  

The New Yorker said, “the film is more than fascinating and ingenious; it's strangely, poetically, poignantly beautiful."  The New York Times compared it to Orson Welle’s War of the Worlds. 

Despite a limited release, the film has already broken a 20-year box office record in the US. Tickets to cinemas are being scalped. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, the big online reviewers, currently have it as one of the greatest films of all time.  

How can anything possibly live up to that hype? 

I’m both absorbing all the noise about this film, the reviews and the praise, and at the same time trying not to get my hopes up.    

But while most New Zealanders are counting down the days until the election, there’s another milestone on my calendar a few days afterwards that I’m even more keenly anticipating. I’ve got tickets. I’ve got a babysitter and I’ve got impossibly high expectations. Tell me I'm not crazy. Tell me I'm not setting myself up for disappointment. Tell me that yes, sometimes... the greatest experiences are worth every bit of hype.