"If you want to succeed in this world, promise everything and deliver nothing."

(Napoleon Bonaparte)

Los Angeles

Jack is a guy with a sculpted physique, like a Greek god.

He carries with him a sort of heavy helmet that is supposed to replace any gym: wearing it allows you to work out and strengthen your neck muscles like no other trainer could do.

His week begins, precisely eight days during which he tries to convince famous people such as Lenny Kravitz and Paris Hilton to be his brand ambassadors. In particular, with Kravitz, who tries to avoid him at all costs, Jack embarks on a stalking journey that borders on the edge of a restraining order.

He is also contacted by a company to which he had proposed his creation. The CEO, a certain Bob, seems interested: the possibility of a productive business is within reach, especially since the secretary begins a persuasion campaign about the effectiveness of the bizarre heavy headgear, which Jack claims is the trainer of famous celebrities.

The problem is how to start producing a thousand units within three days to get them on the market.

Thus begins a surreal, delirious, neon-colored journey where photography, anecdotes, characters, cars, encounters that turn into confrontations, and outfits become the true entertainment, filled with everything and nothing.

The show is there, and the originality and extreme artistic contemporaneity of the form are definitely unusual and creative: a fun 95-minute installation where the dialogue is minimal, but the idea is anything but simple, even if redundant.

Jack’s obsessive pursuit of becoming rich and famous through a rather futile, unnecessary, ineffective, and unproductive product, possibly even harmful, does not back down in the face of any doubt, which eventually turns into rejection.

And even though nothing seems to work for the American dream to come true, something happens that unpredictably, involuntarily, and unconsciously triggers a reaction from the audience, turning them into borderline maniacal followers, seduced by a muscle-bound but brainless young man who exposes his personal struggles to the public, making the product, in no time, the most coveted, desired, and sought-after item in the social media world.

This confirms how the trend of personal exposure, past traumas, pain, loneliness, victimization, abandonment, and illness always resonates and works.

It’s not the value of the product that matters, but the image that owning it represents, to the point of making it obsessively desirable: a principle of conformity is at play, not action but an unthinking conform-ation driven by a pathological imperative that discourages the individualization process in favor of homogenization.

The product must produce, create, invent, and instill the need for itself, and to do this, the method is subtle, seemingly sophisticated yet insidious, basic, and elementary.

An unusual, absurd, and grotesque indie comedy, directly proportional to the grotesque and absurd power and evanescence of success or failure in the age of social media.

"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure."

(Mark Twain)

20-Oct-2024 by Beatrice