We Are All Just Inspirations for the Record We Leave Behind

Pay attention. This one's a cautionary tale.

The least-likely sage I ever, EVER expected.

It’s hard for me to decide how to even begin discussing what’s on my mind. It feels too big, too scattered, too many loose ends to draw together to find the point. So here’s what I’m going to do. In the spirit of the message of the post as a whole (you’ll see that in a minute), I’m just going to begin writing. The muse is my co-pilot. Let’s see how it goes.

I know that what I want to say centers on the movie Vengeance, written and directed by B.J. Novak, which is easily one of my favorite movies of the past few years — maybe one of my favorites of all time. I know it has to do with a writer’s voice — any creative voice, really — and I know it has to do with modern alienation, the emptiness of digital culture, and a forsaking of today in the interest of tomorrow that leaves me feeling hollow inside the longer I think about it.

Fun stuff, right? Let’s start with the premise. And obviously … spoilers for Vengeance ahead, so be warned.

On the surface, Vengeance is a comedy. It’s about a self-centered New York writer named Ben Menalowitz (Novak) who prefers a no-strings-attached approach to life and love. One night, Ben gets a phone call from the grief-stricken brother of a recently-deceased woman named Abilene Shaw with whom he hooked up a few times … nothing more. To the family, though, Ben was Abilene’s devoted boyfriend. So, out of guilt, he awkwardly heads to Texas for Abilene’s funeral, at which point he learns that her brother Ty is convinced she was murdered, rather than overdosing per the official report.

The thrust of the film, then, is:

1. Nominally, it’s about the quest for vengeance, led by Ty with Ben’s assistance, against Abilene’s supposed (but so-far unknown) murderer.

2. But actually, it’s about Ben’s creation of a podcast that ends up being about Abilene’s death — a podcast he’s been wanting to host for a while but hasn’t yet found a hook (or buy-in) for, so that he can be a bit more rich and famous.

Because, see, although Ty claims that Abilene was murdered, Ben doesn’t buy it at all. He tells the family he’s going to document the search for her killer on the podcast, but he’s actually telling his future listeners a more thematic story. Here’s what he says to his producer:

This is an existential crime story. This is In Cold Blood, but there are no killers. This is about a new American reality that people can’t accept, so they invent these conspiracies so they can cast themselves as heroes because the truth is too hard to accept. The death of Abilene is about the death of American identity and the need to find someone to blame for it. This isn’t just a story about vengeance. It’s a story about the need for vengeance — the meaning of vengeance.

So that’s the setup: a jaded New Yorker traveling rural West Texas searching for a killer who isn’t there, secretly seeking the secret of the modern age.

That thematic-as-shit hook alone, makes this movie worth the watch. Of course Ben is actually the one who turns out to be lost inside, looking for meaning. Of course the lessons he learns apply to himself, but also to the world we live in. The theme alone — all I’ve given you so far — makes this movie brilliant in my book.

But that’s not why I’m writing a post about it. Let’s talk next about the best part — the best character, and the least likely person I’d ever have expected to move me with his profundity.

Enter Quentin Sellers

That’s right. Ashton fucking Kutcher. I’ve never been a fan, but now I am. I know he was given poignant lines, but hot damn did he deliver them like a pro.

This is his character, backwoods music producer Quentin Sellers. Yes, big hat. Yes, little porno mustache. YES, fancy scarf and a white suitcoat that sometimes has roses on it:

You don’t expect wise shit from someone with a neckline that low.

Ben visits Sellers at his “music factory” to get some local flavor for his podcast, which again is theoretically about the death of Abilene Shaw. Abilene was an aspiring musician who never made her mark, and she recorded with Quentin. So Ben visits expecting the guy to be a hayseed joke, which he certainly appears to be. But it turns out Ben was wrong about Quentin. He’s actually extremely insightful.

Quentin feels that the problem with the world isn’t a lack of creativity and innovation. It’s an excess of it.

The problem is, you got all these bright, creative lights and nowhere to plug in their energy. So it gets channelled into conspiracy theories, and drugs, and violence.

Quentin’s extremely passionate about music. In one telling scene, he’s watching a lackluster performance from a singer, so he interrupts her and says this:

Let’s take a step back. I want to share an idea with you. There’s no argument more profound than how the universe came into existence. Are we here because of God, or science? It is, by its very nature, the most fundamental question. But there’s one thing that everyone agrees on, and that is whether it was God declaring “Let there be light,” or an infinite particle of energy bursting forth in the Big Bang, everyone — and I do mean everyone — agrees that the universe started with a sound.

What we're recording here isn't your record. It's your sound, on the record that started with the very first moment in time. So when you sing this song, I want you think about how what you're making is the record of your time here on this Earth. It's the sound that you scratch with your life on the record of the universe.

So she digs deep. Sings from her heart, knowing she’s making her mark.

There’s a lot more here about creation and art, but I’ll leave you to watch the movie instead of going into it. Sellers talks about how his field of creation — music — used to be something that controlled us. We used to buy an entire album without even knowing which songs were on it, but now everything is on-demand. Now you can sign up to recommended playlists, and just consume what the algorithm feeds you.

But this was the part that really got me: When Ben (who’s changed his mind by now about Quentin and sees him as much more than some throwaway joke) asks what advice Quentin would give him if he came asking for advice about his own writing voice, Quentin says:

I'd probably say that nobody writes anything. All we do is translate. So if you ever get stuck and you don't know what to say, just listen. Even to the silences. Listen as hard as you can to the world around you, and repeat back what you hear. That translation? That's your voice.

Man can I relate. I don’t know about you, but I never really feel like I’m creating anything. I feel like I’m reaching blindly into a void and seeing what comes out. I agree with Stephen King: Stories — and maybe all art — already exist, whole and complete, in some other place. It’s our job as creators not to make that art or tell those stories, but to uncover them. Or, in this case, to translate them … and to understand that the specific way we translate — the filter through which we parse that “thing from a deeper place” — that’s our voice.

After meeting with Quentin, Ben takes home a thumb drive full of Abilene’s recordings. When he was hooking up with her, he ignored anything deep that might have made them closer … including and especially her music, which meant so much to her and defined her as a person. Now, though, with Quentin’s words in his head, Ben watches and listens to it all. He finally sees this woman he never saw before … and begins to fall in love with her a little, now that she’s gone.

I’ll ramp up my spoilers going forward, so be warned again if you’re still trying to avoid them.

After a lot of back-and-forth and trials and tribulations (many comedic, if darkly so), we finally realize two things: First, Abilene did die of an overdose, even though Ben believed otherwise along with Ty for a while. And second, Quentin Sellers himself was the local Oxy kingpin who sold her what killed her, then dragged her into a known interjurisdictional no-man’s-land to let her die.

Ben covertly records him confessing, but afterward, Quentin says it’s good, that’s good that he did; Ben should let him know if he wants Quentin to re-record any quotes … because Ben’s podcast will make them famous, and they’ll be talking about it on a panel together some day.

Quentin’s not worried about repercussions. At first, yes, people will blame him for Abilene’s death and call him a villain, but he didn’t actually kill her; he simply didn’t help her, and that’s a big difference.

And, Quentin goes on, then the armchair-pundit fans of Ben’s podcast will keep right on talking, en masse online, because that’s what people do these days. Eventually they’ll run out of bad things to ay about Quentin and will turn to wondering about Ben instead. In forums and on social media, they’ll talk about how Ben didn’t care about Abilene when she was alive, and how his neglect might have driven her to drugs and overdose. Worse, they’ll say Ben exploited her memory and her family. They’ll say that all he wanted was a big podcast publicized by a big producer … and he didn’t care who he stepped on to get it.

Then those online folks will blame Abilene’s family — who, by the way, Ben’s podcast will have turned into mere quirky characters by then. That’s what the family will be reduced to: famous characters, not famous people.

And Quentin says:

Then they’ll start in with the conspiracy theories. Then someone will refute the conspiracy theories. And then one side will make their version their cause. And then the other side will take the other side … just to take the other side! And on and on, until your story proves the defining truth of our time: Everything means everything, so nothing means anything.

Ben tells him, Some things mean something. Like Abilene. But Quentin has him there, too:

Abilene? You didn’t care about her. You came here for yourself. For a recording. And then you heard her music. You saw her photos. The record of her. And that’s what you care for: a recording, not a person.

Then the coup de grace — the line that haunts me every time I hear it:

We are all just inspirations for the record of ourselves.

Meaning that we’ve built a world where people don’t matter. Where the moment doesn’t matter. Where living, as it happens, has no value in and of itself … not unless we record it and post it on Instagram or YouTube or TikTok. We’ve become so hollow as people that what we seek most isn’t to live, but to have lived.

I understand this way of thinking. I’ve fallen into it. Something happens, and it seems most important to capture it somehow — to save it for later, because if it’s not “on record” to be seen in the future (that whole “the scratch you make with your life on the record of the universe” thing), then it doesn’t matter. When I was heading off to spend a college semester in Luxembourg, I considered taking my video camera with me, which at the time was a huge VHS camcorder. I decided against it, but not because it wouldn’t fit in my luggage. I decided not to take it because I decided I’d rather experience my time abroad than to watch it through a lens.

Very few things are kept private and “just for us” these days. We have to document what we have, what we do, what we love and hate and are indifferent to. We can’t exist NOW because if we do that completely, we won’t be able to prove that we were here at all.

Nobody wants to let anything have its time, then fade away. Everything is on YouTube. Everything gets posted. You can’t move on from the past version of yourself because the internet is forever. We all move forward … but always with one foot in the past.

I think you should watch Vengeance. Then re-watch it.

But even more than that, I think we should all put our cameras and phones down sometimes, be human, and act like dust in the wind. Right now we’re here. Some day we won’t be … but that’s okay. It’s life’s ephemeral nature that makes it worthwhile.

The choice is yours: Live now, or look back and see how you lived.

You can’t choose both, and the clock is ticking.