more vivid than sunsets

this is a show about alienation and its effects on the parasitic non-haute-bourgeoisie / consumer aristocracy. {Matt Johnson} didnt know that thats what its about, and that (the fact that he didn't know) is why it is so rich. the core tension at the heart of ntbts isnt actually about their relationship or fame or music but about the fantasy of totally unalienated labor that the band represents to him.

this hit me the hardest in The Buena Vista Social Club, a very sweet and funny episode. the ending montage is basically the first time we see [matt] enjoying interacting with people other than jay, on his own, in Cuba, a country marked by poverty but with the kinds of social relations only found on the margins of capitalism or outside it to some extent. it serves as a little glimpse into that contradiction at the heart of the show (the veil gets pulled back a bit in Viceland too in their interactions with homeless people and street musicians? but it seems moreso played for laughs there).

[{mMatt jJohnson}] is constantly alienating himself from the social world via fiction and metafiction, both its [{consumption}] and its {creation}. but more than anything else, he fears the alienation of his labor. in Cuba, he experiences kindness, welcoming, surpassing the language barrier, intertwined with the shock of meeting people who have never seen an iPhone, meeting a man who sets fires and herds cattle, dancing with a group of kids who welcome him in. he's from Queen Street.

he's apart from jay for just a day. he's torn away from his little world - immersed in a revolutionary proletarian culture, surrounded by people who welcome him in despite the language barrier and his obvious commodification of their culture. he's torn - he's inspired by the promise of fame, he realizes he misunderstood the situation, he says these are just some stupid cuban dancers - he puts down the phone and looks and for a second he gets it, or starts to. and i think he might even realize what makes Cuba Cuba, and what makes its art and culture so greatly different from what he's used to in klanada.

and the realization shocks him, and [he] misses jay, so he goes back home. he goes back to toronto because unalienated labor & the material comfort he's used to are irreparably at odds. {He} goes back to insisting, in interviews and podcasts, that klanadian culture is just the nicest, the coolest, people are so good to you. (thought shamelessly ripped from @petrodragonicapocalypse <3).

expand scope. matt's control over jay, his dramatic highs and lows, his suicide attempts and time-turning, at the thought of jay leaving him, it's all inextricable from his discomfort with the idea of alienated, or even socially-organized, labor. jay getting a job doesn't stick in matt's craw so much because it would take jay away from him - compare his reaction to jay having a girlfriend (upset, lashing out, misogynistic) to his reaction to jay wanting a part time job as a jingle writer (suicidal, life-ruining, show-ending) - it's because it would merge their little self-contained u/dys-topia with (alienated, albeit non-exploited) labor.

it's the link between his watsonian deepest fear (losing jay) and [matt from ntbts]/{Matt Johnson}'s doyleist deepest fear (being proletarianized, no longer being [a trust fund kid LARPing as a] {a famous and well-regarded} self-sustaining artist, having to work the same kind of menial job as the people [delivering his pizza and showing him around clothing and tech stores] {hanging around in the background, sometimes almost prop-like, in everything he makes})

everything about [matt] and jay's life is sustained by the labor they abhor. they get food delivered, they pester customer service workers, hell, the money in matt's trust fund didn't come from nowhere. this is nothing out of the ordinary for a good old artist-story. where it becomes especially interesting, though, is the fact that they have nothing to show for it. they are parasitic (in the political economy sense, not the Nazi sense, don't have a cow, man!) without even cultural output to show for it, just a constant spinning of wheels. {Matt and Jay}, on the other hand, bear a similar economic and social position without the futility and stagnation.

for all that Matt's work is intentionally harshly self-critical, i think that recognition of the petit-bourgeois (and thus slowly dying) nature of Artistic Individuality is beyond his grasp. he imagines his idea of “making it” as being disconnected from fame and fortune per se - less about money and more about “self-expression” - but still this desire for self-expression and self-dissection is ultimately just as bourgeois a goal as if he were in it for the money in the first place, and this is the one part of his process that he’s not self-aware of.

"it's cogent, but because his sole goal is "making it" (even if hidden behind characters, the fact that this is the central premise of ntb is absolutely a reflection of a real feeling in real life matt and jay), everything is kind of secondary. so if he "makes it", if he gets the attention and the funding and the license to do what he loves, he views everything that led him there as necessary and proof of the truth of his worldview" -phyrex h. @phywreks, 2026

1. the dirties (2013) is a movie with multiple layers of reality we'll simplify as the actors (real life matt and owen), the characters (fictional matt and owen) and the characters these characters play in their own movie (dirties matt and owen).

2. with jay mccarrol out of the question, the search for a co-star/best friend for (f) matt was long and tedious. through evan morgan, (rl) matt johnson and owen williams became friends before + during the filming of the movie the dirties and this was good to keep all the nature of their relationship as realistic as possible, something particularly important to matt, who wants his films to seem as real as they could ever be. matt made sure he could maximize the time he spent with owen by getting him a job at his workplace, which also gave them more confidence for sneaking around for the movie. matt has described his relationship with owen at the time as owen becoming his best friend before they even started filming.

2.1. owen, even as someone who didn't know matt before the making of the dirties, was an incredibly cooperative and compliant party and someone who understood the level to which matt wanted the movie to be real. the main theme of the movie itself is the blurring of fiction and reality, and this much is true for the characters as well as the viewer as we struggle to tell where one thing starts and the other ends. the thing is that for this to happen it had to be true for the actors as well. much like (f) owen didn't ever understand when (f) matt was acting and when he wasnt, (rl) owen also seems to have struggled to keep up with all of it. you can see cases of it in the movie itself. ie: (rl) matt pretending to shoot owen getting turned into something we take when watching as an interaction between (f) matt and owen. under matt's principle, every single shot is necessary and must be able to be repurposed for whatever his current project is.

3. (f) matt is specifically written as a character that has repressed romantic feelings towards owen. this has been acknowledged by both (rl) matt and josh boles, writers, and it helps tie the entire movie together. (f) matt being bullied gets him called a faggot and questioned on what he likes. owen is bullied as well, but matt is almost exclusively a target for this specific sort of treatment and owen seems to get it by association to matt and rather rarely when it’s him on his own.

3.1. while (f) matt's awareness of the above is debatable, it is more than certain that owen is not ever aware of it and thus does not even consider being able to reciprocate these feelings.

3.2. (rl) owen was, apparently, somehow, also not aware that [3] was written as such.

3.2.1. this didn't affect the filming process, however, because (rl) owen just played himself, heterosexual and unaware of this fact. it's the naturalism that matt (and as a consequence (f) matt also) wanted of him.

4. (rl) matt is playing a character named (f) matt that is playing a character named (d) matt. all these matts are the same at their core. (d) matt is a version of (f) matt's sublimated desires and problems with distinguishing fiction and reality, and he begins framing his actions as something for the sake of (d) matt or self-referencing, so really, he's just constantly performing as (f) matt in the first place.

4.1. which means (f) matt is a version of (rl) matt's...

4.1.1. matt's consistent need to write characters that are alternate versions of him that aren't limited by social standards, and who he makes a point to make them have their own sublimated and repressed desires, and typically ones of a homosexual nature, is certainly indicative of something. once again, his typical justification for this is that it helps every single second of footage become a possible shot for a movie. in the scene where he leans in to lick the blood off owen's arm, he calls it a reference to skateboarding videos, which is wrapped up on and specific to itself to read true, but still an example of what we see (f) matt do for the 82 minute runtime of the movie.

4.2. as (rl) matt's first movie, it's very obvious it was and still is insanely important to him. he spent a lot of time and effort and did many things for the movie that he has said he would never want to do again. the limits (f) matt crossed were something (rl) matt was crossing himself for the sake of the movie. they had the same mentality. for months after the filming, matt dedicated himself to absolutely nothing more but editing and continuing to work on the movie to make it the best it could possibly be. he involved himself so much in it he completely halted his life in every other aspect. matt wanted to jump in front of a train for a cool movie shot and couldn't fathom the many different consequences coming from even attempting this. "matt gets too invested to the point everything becomes about and for the movie" is quite literally the character arc (f) matt goes through.

4.3. so there is a bit of matt in every fictional version of him, to varying degrees, and it makes it a two-way mirror where the characters must be drawing from the real man in some way. looking back on himself, matt has basically said he used to, too, perform constantly, trying to be funny or good in a way that embarrasses and angers his present self. honestly, we could now circle back to [4.1] and make some assumptions.

5. matt and jay's writing and filming process and overall art creation is strongly founded on their mutual understanding of each other and constant back and forth. they know each other like no one else on earth and every decision taken is built upon an improv where their characters are intertwined in a forever codependent way that they keep returning to as people and actors. any scene or any kind of teasing or fight is something coming directly from their core, because they know each other to the point everything's built into their dynamic in an extremely personal way, and they’re reaching into the other's core to pull these reactions out like wires and ribbons. as an example, the character aspect of matt needing to control every aspect of jay's life out of fear and uncontrollable affection is something they're both choosing to write.

5.1. on the other hand, matt and owen's films are more serious in nature. their differences in interests being put aside by owen's capability to just ignore that for the sake of acting already sets the ground differently for their characters. because it's beyond clear matt could honestly say anything and owen would just let it brush past him under the assumption it's just another thing he wouldn't get. in both their projects, (f) owen sees his relationship with matt as something less intense and doesn’t rely on matt in the way matt wishes he did. much like the crush in the dirties is one-sided, the relationship as a whole is less important to owen merely as a result of matt's view of it bordering on a massive fixation. with his intensity remaining unmatched, there's a stronger sense of matt having the upper hand. his behaviors towards owen are more of a looming force and, tonally, far less ridiculous than they are towards jay. in both movies, we see owen freak out and beg matt to stop and argue with him, and we see matt dutifully ignore this. objectively speaking, (rl) owen does not have a semblance of jay's writing authority off-camera and it helps make the characters' dynamics more sinister. it feels much less agreed on, because it is. (f) matt is more pointedly a director, who gets to keep the cameras rolling and following owen around school and whose hubris makes operation avalanche succeed but gets owen killed. in his actions, matt is a threat, even if he doesn’t want to be, and he's so tainted with irony he can't recognize it in himself. matt's characters are extremely out of control even in their own projects, but their actions inevitably control owen. matt does things for and to owen and owen just reacts to them, whether because he doesn’t understand or because he is able to step away from the imaginary world matt builds with his films more properly.

5.1.1. which is another case of (rl) reflection, though these ones happened backwards—because until operation avalanche (2016), and then after it, owen could, in fact, step away from that imaginary world of acting and filmmaking, since he saw it as a small time of his life for experimentation and having fun with his friends. matt cannot step away from his films because that’s his passion and his life, even when it’s driving him to obsession with the results, like any good artist, or generally harmful extremes (and all of this without even going into the dirties–opav era having been implied to be really hard years for matt's mental health in general, which two stressfully, chaotically and disorganizedly produced films both indicated and fed into.)

5.2. as a small tangent, matt and boles have known each other for a very, very long time and it clearly shows that they are very comfortable writing together. they’re extreme opposites in their process, so matt needs boles for his realism and more on-paper organization which would've otherwise doomed operation avalanche before it even reached the fixing of post-production, and boles needs matt for his ability to stubbornly achieve anything he sets his mind to cinematically. boles dislikes the incomprensible abstract of jared in the dirties and matt dislikes being forced to write a proper outline when his movie's going to shit. it's a clear conjointed effort in both films.

5.2.1. i cannot help but think about how it's quite peculiar to think of them ideating a movie with the concept of matt having those infamous sexual designs on his best friend, which the actor for the best friend, owen, then didn't recognize, and then them moving on to attempt to write a second movie in which matt had his own heterosexual love interest and was originally much, much closer to boles in the story, only for this to prove extremely convoluted, making them once again choose the simpler narrative of owen as the most important person in matt's life. after their actors being some time apart from each other, matt and owen in operation avalanche can't not be a subversion/reversion/alternate of matt and owen in the dirties, and it can be felt in the differences.

6. the following is true in every possible version of them: matt and owen are best friends. matt and owen are making a movie. matt takes the movie more seriously. matt seems to the friendship more seriously, too. owen enjoys the project and cares greatly for matt, but he is indulged only to a certain point, for he has other priorities in his life like a love interest/a family/a job, and has the ability to connect to a normaler world where movies aren't the only thing that matters. matt justifies everything as a movie reference. owen does not know or understand matt's movie references. matt can pull pranks and do dangerous things to owen, as a joke, but owen never does this to matt, and as these things escalate, owen might start to get more genuinely scared, bothered or concerned. owen will ask matt to stop for some reason or another and matt will not ever oblige, because he sees the scenes or moments as far too funny to stop or far too good in a way that owen just can't see. ultimately, the director will have the last word and he gladly listens to his crew's suggestions until they're trying to dissuade him from something. intentionally, but in a way that cannot be escaped, the lines between fiction and reality are impossible to discern even when you try to put the circumstances of acting aside. it's in plain sight: matt and owen are, in every way, like matt and owen.

6.1. the following is true for the more intense fictional itineration of matt and owen, layer one of fiction: matt is so close to owen he falls in love with him, something he cannot process and thus sublimates through his only other love: filmmaking.