brain worms

Slow Processor

This is not a post about You Can See Everything.

Lia Matthew Brown

Lia Matthew Brown

— 8 min read
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Slow Processor

I’m a slow processor. It’s one of the things I like least about myself — or, maybe, “liking” or “not liking” is less the point, than that it disappoints me. It is at odds with how I’d like to move and be in the world. It causes me trouble, or at least, what I perceive as trouble. 

I respond to things later. I understand them later. Probably most importantly, I feel the way I really feel about them, later. Someone can take a potshot at my dog in a conversation and 12 hours later, I’ll be like, wait what? Why did that happen? Why didn’t I react in real time and deal with it then? And how dare they take a potshot at my dog??

When I was a kid, the girl I had a crush on called me a terrible name in front of, I shit you not, the whole class — and I literally walked it off. Chuckled, walked it off. I was devastated, but I didn’t even feel that till later.

I don’t know. I know there’s not much utility in trying to out-think the way one thinks; or design, with intentionality, a better way to do it. Inasmuch as thinking is anything, it’s behaviour, and changing behaviour is hard work over long stretches of time. I also back-door suspect some things can’t be changed at all; that there are slow processors and fast processors, just like there are neurodivergent people and neurotypical people and all sorts of people who are on the spectrum between those non-specific poles. There are people who are inherently reactive; and people who are inherently proactive; and there are people who are neurotic, and the opposite of whatever neurosis is. I’ve said before that there are people without imagination. There are two types of people in the world: people who are reading this post right now, and people who aren’t. And so on, and so on. 

The challenge in all of this is that everything here (except the last) is a generality, and that there’s no single set of categories into which everyone neatly falls. We’re all, kinda sorta, portions of all of these things in varying amounts. And I’m a slow processor.

Here’s a question: is curiosity a muscle? Can it be built, strengthened? I was thinking of this while I was watching Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s (already iconic) new film You Can See Everything. Fielder is on-camera throughout the film as both subject and object; he is Elizabeth Holmes’ interlocutor in the first half, and then works through his response to all of that in the second half, after she’s gone to prison and he can no longer speak to her.

The approach is at times death-defyingly intimate. (This is my way of saying: I could never. The awkwardness.) An early shot sees Holmes burping her baby (her baby might be part of the film’s strategy, for reasons better explained elsewhere) and as she taps the child’s back, the lavalier mic on Holmes’ own chest thuds BUM BUM BUM BUM BUM. We’re that up close and personal with this group of people. In ways no horror movie has ever been before, this is a horror movie, if your horror is having nowhere (socially) to hide.

Something I noticed about Fielder while watching You Can See Everything is how much curiosity he brings to each conversation with Holmes. He is extremely present. He understands things instantly — or actually, I’m realizing as I’m writing this, what is notable to me is that he instantly understands when he does not understand something. He doesn’t just go along — he immediately asks “Why?” when Holmes or her partner, weirdo Billy Evans, say something that doesn’t tally with whatever causal chain they are exploring. 

Now, per being a slow processor, this is simply something I cannot do. Or, I do not think I do it. I can rarely be so aware in a conversation, so present, that I fail to obey the agreed-upon track signals of the interaction which move me frictionlessly to the next station rather than stopping here to diagnose what is actually happening. The LLM in my brain just finds the next right thing to say and says it. The next right thing to say is rarely “Why?” in my case, because I abhor conflict and discomfort and would rather equivocate and/or make a joke (I love making a joke) than be more direct, insightful, or curious. The sooner I get to the next station the sooner the conversation is over, and that is (generally, for me) a net good.

But I’d love to be better at the other thing, even though I suppose it’s going to come with a whole lot of that discomfort I’ve been saying I prefer to avoid. Part of the reason is that I’ve been feeling my loops a lot lately. There’s an entire persona(lity?) I invented back in my teens that I’ve been looking at with a gimlet eye more often, for obvious reasons, and it annoys me how easily, even among trusted and careful friends, the iron doors of that performance slam down over anything more genuine or real. One of the considerations in my meditation practice, especially lately, has been: Is there a bit of space I can find somewhere in an interaction, to speak more with my true voice, and a more curious or more empathetic mind, leading to more valuable speech?

As an aside: I saw You Can See Everything in a sold-out screening (!!) at 2:00 on a Monday (!!!) in October (!!!!) and I was sitting next to a bloke I did not know, who laughed loudly and often, and almost always in the wrong place — because I think his operating principle for amusement was “Nathan Fielder is funny.”

It’s really something to see a film about a person who might genuinely have a neurodivergence that prevents her from interpreting language and communication the way we “commonly” interpret it… and to watch it while sitting next to a guy whose driving premise for amusement seems to be “Nathan Fielder onscreen = laugh” and is therefore laughing at all the wrong times, loudly and persistently, but missing (or remaining silent for) the actual jokes, because they tend not to be the “Nathan Fielder is here, haha!” moments, but the moments just after them, when the wry purpose of a glance is made clear, or the excruciating context of an intimacy is shown to the audience.

The guy next to me was in his loops, in other words, which only underlined a lot of the above for me as I watched the film. How in tune are any of us with what is actually being said or done? How quickly are we processing? How “here right now” are we, on any given day?

I spend some of my time with some folks who are so stuck in their loops they’ll likely never get out of them, and that’s not really my problem except in that it makes me sad. One refuses to admit they’re unhappy and the other cannot imagine not being sad, and those core assumptions sort of drive the whole boat, personalitywise. It’s less studied falsehood than long-accepted delusion, and no, I don’t think anything in You Can See Everything falls into either of those categories, but I tell ya, they scare the shit outta me. The older I get, the easier I find it to imagine myself accepting the comforts of a worn-in worldview, a means of operating, a “permanent” personality. I think that’s why I’m quibbling with it so hard, right now. Maybe this is my two-thirds-life crisis. 

Another aside, probably very anecdotal: the guy laughing beside me was, by looks anyway, a guy. The theatre as a whole had a plurality of (again, by looks; by sound), women. You Can See Everything, I think, is a film that plays very differently — and is likely designed to play very differently — for men and for women. There are gendered elements of the film that are very, very specific. There are insights and understandings into actions certain characters take, or specific things certain people say, which seem purposefully designed to be read one way by men (and/or go entirely over their heads) and knowingly understood by women. There are moments in the film, which again I will not spoil because this piece is not really about that, where the women in the audience reacted as one. The men – even Laughing Trevor, beside me – were silent.

Given my bidirectional gender assignment I’m not saying I was perfectly in tune with the spectrum of responses in the film, but I felt like I was surely more aware of it all than Laughing Trevor. There’s a kind of looking in the movie that dares the audience to consider Holmes as an artifact of womanhood — baby, breast pump; long, maternal crying jags which, near the top of the movie, she assures Fielder she is not capable of — all while doting so close-up on her horror-movie mask of a face and the way you can see the whites of her eyes all the way around, that you almost feel like you’re going crazy. Part of the project of You Can See Everything is to atomize all the causal chains of how we interpret personhood until it’s like you’ve repeated a word to yourself so many times that it no longer sounds correct (even though it is). 

I note I got almost all of this in the moment, i.e. while I was watching the film. Not later; during. I even took notes during the screening, which is not something I’ve done for many years, since back when I was reviewing every movie I saw, for this blog or elsewhere. Later, in these pages, I could elaborate that shorthand into something more like a readable census of what I thought and how it made me feel. I’m a slow processor — it’s like this for me. I get something immediately, but they’re just fragments beneath language which needed to be hammered post-facto into something that can better account for itself.

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