Duplass-a-Thon: Reflections on the Unexpected
By Zach Endres
You often hear that life takes strange turns, and you don't realize how true this is until you think back to a year ago and realize the old you would never see the new you coming. So much can happen in so little time. Your normal commute to work ended up in a wreck, which led to life-altering injuries or a fancy new car purchased self-indulgently for once. You moved to a new city when you were all but set on staying in a rut on familiar turf. You got your dream job. You got a job you didn't even know was your dream job until you got it. You lost your job. You dyed your hair. Someone you know died. You died.
It's often hard to notice these turns when they're isolated incidents, because not all of them are painfully obvious. Sometimes it takes an impromptu post-screening concert outside the Alamo Drafthouse Village for the reality of the statement "Life takes strange turns" to sink in, something small but memorable to prod you to think back and discover how far you've come or how far you've fallen, and to get you thinking about what the next year might hold.
The Austin Film Society's Duplass-a-Thon -- a screening of former-Austinites Mark and Jay Duplass's most recent feature, The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, and a couple of their shorts -- provided an unexpected convergence of life and art, as the subject of Jay Duplass's short documentary Kevin played a set of original songs for an intimate crowd in the muggy Austin night. We came for the Duplasses, but we stayed for Kevin Gant. Who would have thought?
Jay's debut documentary covers Gant's career as an Austin musician in the '90s, his subsequent, unexplained disappearance and his re-emergence in 2009 (when Jay discovered him working at UPS). Strange turns, indeed. With the help of Jay's documentary and its festival rounds -- it premiered at SXSW 2011 -- Kevin's muse suddenly reignited. He picked up his guitar once more, and it didn't take long for him to end up in front of the Drafthouse, gaily playing songs for us all.
There was proof of the theory of strange turns in the preceding program itself — if that even needs any further proving. I doubt many would contest it, unless they haven't lived longer than a year or have an inhumanely solid five-year plan. The Do-Deca-Pentathlon is the Duplasses at their best: seasoned and efficient, their style refined and confident. Viewing this feature made the following shorts program all the more intriguing. Starting with their cult classic The New Brad and moving forward in their career with This Is John, Scrapple, The Intervention and, of course, Kevin, the program chronicled the brothers' growth as filmmakers and showed the complete arc from their humble, digital beginnings to their current celebrity-laden prestige.
On the outside, these shorts seem so simple, aesthetically right at home in the era of YouTube they coincided with, but there are obvious seeds within the digital noise that can be tracked to The Do-Deca-Pentathlon and Cyrus and Jeff Who Lives at Home. Who knew that these dudes running around their neighborhood filming The New Brad would eventually direct the likes of John C. Reilly and Jason Segel? In retrospect, it makes sense, as is often the case, but it makes you think: Which kid on YouTube is going to take a strange turn and achieve the same?
If anything, the night was an inspiring one. Seeing the trajectory of the Duplass brothers' career so plainly laid before us and experiencing the ups and downs of Kevin Gant's own career seemed to make everyone in attendance feel that, despite the negativity of the world, despite the wall of opposition that faces us all, perhaps it's possible to achieve a dream, or at least be happy. A tough feat, considering how easy it is to be cynical. But it's dangerous to be too optimistic, making this night a dangerous one as well. As we listened to Kevin play his heart out with a smile on his face, as we saw him so satisfied with his current lot, it was hard not to get a tingling sensation that our strange turns in the next year would be turns for the better, taking us to places we all wanted to be, places we all felt within our reach that night.
Zach Endres is an apprentice at the Austin Film Society.