A pair of aging men carry a nude plastic mannequin down the street, its splayed feet dragging on the sidewalk. A woman in Penn Station covers a vast coffee spill with two sheets of newspaper. The actor Kyle MacLachlan, calm and well coiffed, runs his MetroCard through a turnstile ten times before giving up. A construction worker dances on a pile of rubble. Two men bite into the same hot dog and hold the pose, a beat longer than they’d like, for a photograph. A middle-aged woman in a striped hat eases a live pigeon into a Duane Reade bag and walks off with it. A skunk waddles past the A.T.M. in a bank vestibule. Someone on the curb pours a box of Cocoa Krispies into his mouth with abandon.
These are but a few of the images in “How To with John Wilson,” an HBO documentary series that captures the pleasures and pains of being in public. Wilson, a filmmaker, has long made a habit of recording as much of his life as possible; a New York native, he started a cult-favorite Vimeo channel, in 2012, that catalogued his curiosities in the form of oblique tutorials, such as “How to Live with Regret” or “How to Keep Smoking.” His new show maintains that formula, building each episode around a lesson—“How to Make Small Talk,” “How to Split the Check,” “How to Cover Your Furniture”—which becomes a mere container for New York’s anarchic energy, to say nothing of Wilson’s own penchant for digression. “How To” is nominally a comedy, but the word doesn’t suffice to describe its artful scope and sensitivity. Wilson, an all-in-one interviewer, narrator, and cameraman, has mastered a technique that might be called happenstance vérité: he presents a spontaneous, authentic, unbounded document of the city in the months before the pandemic. Drawing so much from the streets, the show is almost like aleatory music in its dependence on chance; nearly every shot has the feeling of a happy accident, of something that nearly went unseen. Over six episodes, Wilson’s roving camera stumbles on moments of intimacy, reverie, bizarrerie, and savagery. More than anything, “How To” is a tribute to New York’s double-edged ability to take you places you never wanted to go, among people you never asked to meet, for reasons you’ll never understand.
Wilson starts each episode with a broad, sociological focus. In “How to Split the Check,” he proclaims, in a gentle, halting voice-over, “Figuring out what we owe each other is one of the most challenging parts of living in a healthy society.” The camera shows one driver haranguing another after a fender bender. “How to Put Up Scaffolding” begins with footage of a black Mercedes overturned at an intersection, like a turtle on its back. A tow truck flips it over with a satisfying crunch, and Wilson says, “Everyone in New York is going to die. But, sometimes, the city tries to stop that from happening.” Much of the show unfolds this way, in a wry flurry of montage that brings pathos, and bathos, to Wilson’s narration. In most documentaries, the voice-over elaborates on the imagery; in “How To,” the imagery elaborates on the voice-over. When Wilson says, “All you can do is quietly panic,” he emphasizes it with a clip of a man delicately vomiting from the driver’s seat of a double-parked Toyota.
If this sounds grim, it is. Wilson’s is a New York of trash-strewn streets, bloodstained subway stations, and slack-jawed crowds: the grimy, unglamorous town that seldom appears in movies. He likes to film tacky storefront awnings, people with thousand-yard stares, and pooping dogs. And, of course, he devotes an entire episode to scaffolding, of which there are some two hundred and eighty miles in the five boroughs, he says. Still, his warts-and-all love for the city emanates from the very first frame, which depicts the skyline peeking over a graffitied, overstuffed dumpster. “Hey, New York,” he says. It’s the closest thing he has to a catchphrase.
Wilson has a street photographer’s talent for elevating the banal, and he unearths deep patterns and substrata in his mountain of B-roll. It’s through his interviews that “How To” ’s litany of footage accumulates into something both repulsive and dear. “How to Improve Your Memory” begins as a meditation on forgetfulness, but then, at a Stop & Shop, Wilson runs into the man who created the supermarket’s inventory software. (As with almost everyone Wilson talks to, the man is never named; the show has a great anonymizing effect, as if its characters vanish into the crowd once they’ve said their piece.) The man tells Wilson about the Mandela Effect, a phenomenon in which large groups of people remember an event that doesn’t match the historical record. “Some people have a very distinct memory that Nelson Mandela was killed in prison in the late nineteen-eighties, and then I think around 2009 were kind of shocked to find out that Nelson Mandela was still alive,” he says. At the supermarket, examples of the Mandela Effect are in abundance. Wasn’t Febreze once spelled with two “e” ’s? Didn’t the Raisin Bran mascot, a cartoon sun, used to wear sunglasses? No and no. Intrigued, Wilson begins to notice tears in the fabric of reality. At the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, he spies a giant Ronald McDonald balloon crumpling in Times Square, surrounded by concerned onlookers. Later, he discovers that the TV broadcast of the parade simply replaced “Ronald’s deflating carcass” with footage from the previous year’s parade, when the clown was buoyant and jaunty. “This act of deception created two groups of people with completely different memories of the same event,” he says. “And neither of them is wrong.” More uncertain than ever, he attends the first official Mandela Effect conference, at a Best Western Plus in Ketchum, Idaho, where attendees argue that their faulty memories constitute evidence of alternate universes and “parallel time lines.” “It seemed like I had found the one place where the worse your memory was the more people liked you,” Wilson says.
As a documentarian, Wilson bears similarities to Les Blank, Frederick Wiseman, and Jeff Krulik, who share his receptive spirit and his fascination with arcane institutions and subcultures. “How To” is also cut from the same cloth as “Nathan for You,” the comedian Nathan Fielder’s reality show, in which struggling small-business owners adopt Fielder’s delusional ideas for improving their companies. Fielder is one of “How To” ’s executive producers, and the shows share an editor, Adam Locke-Norton, who lets shots linger into long silences, foregrounding the ungainliness of conversation. (Alice Gregory, a New Yorker contributor, is one of “How To” ’s three writers.) When “Nathan for You” was on the air, some critics found its style cruel or graceless; others wondered if Fielder’s TV persona had Asperger’s syndrome, a suggestion he has rejected. But, as Fielder told Rolling Stone in 2017, “There’s a lot of social disconnects that people experience all the time that have nothing to do with autism or anything.” Those disconnects are an increasing part of communication in the mediated, oversaturated present. By adjusting their shows’ signal-to-noise ratio—favoring the noise—Fielder and Wilson demonstrate what a miracle it is that there’s any signal at all. “If you added two seconds to every shot of every reality TV show,” Wilson told Screen Slate last month, “you would see how truly weird a lot of these people are.”
People open up to Wilson. They tell him about their divorces, their foreskin, their belief that humans were impregnated by aliens. He has a reedy, lisping voice that stumbles over his words, and he’s always obscured by his camera—his “protective mechanism,” one interlocutor astutely calls it—all of which proves disarming. He sometimes has his interviewees hold a vintage, beige Sony microphone that looks like something a newscaster might’ve used in the seventies, and he’ll tell them he’s working on a “student film.” This amateurishness is a ruse, and it brings to mind the late-night, public-access aesthetic that comedians like Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim have cultivated. But they use it to reach new levels of irony; for Wilson, it yields a surprising sincerity. “How To” may not teach you how to do much of anything, but it’s still educational. It has plenty to say about neighborliness, mindfulness, and protecting some part of yourself from a city that demands everything.
The season’s final episode, “How to Cook the Perfect Risotto,” airs on Friday. Halfway through the show, which was filmed in mid-March, Wilson notices that all the TVs in New York are playing the same thing: news about the coronavirus, which has killed one person in the city. Stores are running out of everything; he can’t find the end of the line at the supermarket. “Take care of yourself,” a man at a yard sale tells him. “Just wash your hands, stay away from crowds. It’s gonna be O.K. It’s gonna pass.” Adjusting to life under lockdown, Wilson says, “I may just have to relearn everything I thought I knew. But that’s O.K., because we’re all gonna have to figure it out together, and, right now, we’ve got nothing but time.” He films the view from his window: Queens in the gloaming, the sky a smear of pinks and purples. It is, somehow, the most hopeful image I’ve seen all year.
