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Weird Nonfiction
Clayton Purdom situates nonfictional works designed “with the intention of upsetting, disturbing, or confusing the audience,” in an essay from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 42, “Gossip.”
I was working at a marketing agency at the time, suffusing strategic briefs with literary ambition, and something about the way Marker’s film faded from documentary to sci-fi to philosophical reverie ignited long-dormant neurons in my brain. More recently, you can see it in internet videos by Conner O’Malley and alantutorial, which warp glib, servile YouTube content into frantic horror; Twitter accounts that suggest vast cosmos of deranged characters, like Horse_ebooks and Dril; the speculative football analysis of Jon Bois and the creepypasta narrative of Loab; Nathan Fielder’s increasingly reflexive documentary repertoire, particularly The Rehearsal(2022– ); Adult Swim experiments like Yule Log(2002) and Unedited Footage of a Bear(2014); W. G. Sebald’s ruined literary ruminations and the hours-long musical sagas by the Caretaker that echo them; the series finale of The Hills(2006–10), in which a high-stakes reality-show farewell is filmed, transparently, on a studio backlot; Carmen Maria Machado’s weird fiction novella about Law & Order: SVU; certain Lydia Davis stories, especially “French Lesson”; Room 237(2012), as well as Rodney Ascher’s other deeply credulous documentaries; the cover of David Bowie’s The Next Day(2013); and video games like Cibele(2015), The Beginner’s Guide(2015), and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy(2017). Weird nonfiction is related to the almost overwhelming surplus of simulation theory yarns from the past couple decades—including not just The Matrix and its ilk but also the nested narratives of Wes Anderson, Charlie Kaufman, and Emily St. John Mandel—in that it asks the reader to question the very design of the reality presented to them.
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