Home Movies is an essay about the day-to-day realities and unrealities of its author’s hypermediated consumer life as a teacher and parent in Orlando, Florida. In each of the essay’s seven sections, Wheaton explores his relationships to new media and old tech, and the people around him, with thoughtful ambivalence and humor. Altogether, the various threads of Home Movies—image, tangibility, fame, nostalgia, simulation, marijuana, and cinema history—pull together into a moving attempt to accept the tensions between watching/being watched and life/art.
PRAISE FOR HOME MOVIES
“Michael Wheaton’s Home Movies is a sharply observed exploration of the ways in which images and reality intersect in Wheaton’s life as a father, son, husband, teacher, and artist. Affecting and frequently funny, Home Movies is kaleidoscopic.” —Amy Fusselman, author of Idiophone
“Home Movies made me think in new ways about the evidence that we leave behind and the art that makes life worth living. Michael Wheaton’s writing exists within the collision of media and nostalgia–unexpected, insightful, and revelatory.”—Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else
“I want a director and an editor, not an algorithm,” Michael Wheaton says at the end of Home Movies, whose subtle, bittersweet voice is evidence that human intelligence is still (apparently barely) possible in the age of the algorithm. A significant contribution to an ancient and continuing tradition: Plato’s cave, Benjamin’s work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, Debord’s society of spectacle, DeLillo’s most photographed barn, Baudrillard’s simulacra, Trow’s third parent—TV, etc. A beautiful, melancholy, persuasive book.” —David Shields, author of Reality Hunger
“Home Movies gives the reader that experience that so many books try and fail at: the sense of real life streaming in front of you, both quotidian and remarkable. To call Michael Wheaton’s writing relatable does it a disservice; what he provides is depth and examination to the themes of life that we may recognize but too often take for granted: ambition, creativity, parenthood, love, fear, failure. It’s all here — honest, vulnerable and true.” —Lucas Mann, author of Attachments: On Fatherhood and Other Performances