173. A show about nothing
I.
Seinfeld is a sitcom about nothing. You simply follow the daily life of comedian Jerry Seinfeld and his friends. Every mundane irritation or trivial misunderstanding can escalate over the course of an episode until several petty situations converge and a neat bow can be tied around it.
Season four gets very meta, when Jerry and his best friend George come up with an idea for a TV show. “So you want to come with me to NBC for the pitch?” Jerry asks George. “But I still don’t know what the idea is.”
“It’s about nothing,” says George of the show. “Everyone does something, we do nothing.”
“So NBC asks what the show is about, and I say: ‘nothing!’,” says Jerry. George confirms. To which Jerry replies: “I think you might be onto something here.”
Making something from nothing is extraordinarily difficult. Because before you know it, even nothing ends up being about something. There’s no escaping it.
Still, I keep thinking about it whenever I watch Marcel van Roosmalen’s YouTube series. Under the title Daar Gaan We Weer (Dutch), he and cameraman Kristian Funke make videos that attract only a few thousand viewers each time. They are reports from places Van Roosmalen happens to be anyway. Before his show, he wanders through the town where he’s performing for half an hour and comments on what he sees.
The result is mostly confusion. For Van Roosmalen himself and for the people he encounters. “Sometimes I only understand what happened when I’m editing it,” says Funke at one point. “I just have no idea.”
Van Roosmalen describes the everyday in his characteristic way. Deadpan. Somehow the bleakness of the Netherlands surfaces naturally as a result. A highlight or a low point — depending on how you look at it — is Bovenkarspel. A place where there is nothing, except for a covered shopping centre. And nobody can answer the question of where the actual town centre is.
The story goes that Jerry Seinfeld and writer Larry David came up with the TV series Seinfeld in exactly this way: by walking through a Korean supermarket together and joking about the products. “Maybe the show should be about this,” says David. “You don’t hear people talking about these kinds of things.”
And Jerry looks at him and says: “Yeah… that’s the show.”
II.
A friend tipped me off to watch Dieu est Timide on Mubi. It’s a short animated film by director Jocelyn Charles. Ariel and Paul are on a train. They give each other drawing assignments and are now sketching their greatest fears. Ariel talks about her fear of going to the toilet at night and seeing the shower curtain closed while she’s sitting on the loo. She pulls the curtain aside and there lies a woman in the bathtub with foam on her mouth.
An old woman gets on the train and sits across from them. She glances at the paper and says: “That’s me. That woman is me. And I have that same kind of shower curtain at home.”
Now that’s a little unsettling, but from that point on the real madness begins. It turns out the woman also has a horror story of her own. About how, through her forgetful husband, she came into contact with God.
Online I read that the film is reminiscent of the short story The Witch by Shirley Jackson. A mother sits in a train with her baby and a young son. The boy says he sees a witch outside, who threatened to eat him. Later a man gets on and strikes up a conversation with the boy. He asks about his sister, the baby. Then the man begins a story about his sister and how he took her life. Chilling.
In terms of feeling, the film reminds me more of a Haruki Murakami story he never wrote. Dieu est Timide has a magical realist tone, reinforced by the vivid colours. This makes it very dreamlike.
As a viewer, you find yourself wondering what God would answer to life’s great questions. You shout a question into the void and don’t really expect an answer. Until a voice sounds from that void and turns everything upside down.
PS.
What’s your view on artificial intelligence? The AI Compass is a quiz-like way to find out. I belong to ‘The Disillusioned’. Description: “You watched this movie already with crypto and you know how it ends. It’s oversold, the value is thinner than advertised, and the concrete harms are piling up while everyone argues about the rapture. You document the gap between the promise and the receipts, meticulously.”
The title of the video below really speaks for itself. Generative AI gets in the way of creativity. It’s handy for quickly removing something from a photo with AI, but Andrew fears a ‘slippery slope’. A good one. The more you take shortcuts to work more efficiently, the more you outsource your creative signature to the computer.
Ever since The Witch and The Lighthouse I eagerly look forward to every new film from director Robert Eggers. He delivered a successful retelling of Nosferatu in 2024, and now he’s already back with a film about werewolves. Looks delightfully scary.
PlayStation games will no longer be available on disc from 2028. It had it coming, and yet it makes me grumpy. I’ll leave the explanation to Marcel Vroegrijk at Unpause (in Dutch).
What if you review board games on YouTube and a company keeps emailing asking if you’ll review their sex robot. And what if you just say yes one time to make a funny video about it? Laughed out loud.
Really looking forward to this film about Oasis’s comeback last year.
You just read blog №173, written in the week of 29 June to 5 July 2026. Subscribe to my newsletter and you’ll receive it in your inbox every Sunday, free of charge.